


The Two-Body Problem

by dancinguniverse



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Chicago, Divorce, M/M, Physics, academic au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 01:33:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: Nix is a cosmology researcher at the University of Chicago, plumbing the secrets of the universe, but his time is running out. As the end of his grant approaches, he knows it's time to head back to New Jersey, to the family job awaiting him there, to his wife and his increasingly unhappy marriage. But everything and everyone he loves — the research that gives him purpose, the students he's grown unexpectedly fond of, his colleagues, in the form of Ron and especially his best friend Dick — are in Chicago. Are his career and the life he's carved for himself in Chicago worth destroying his family's expectations?





	The Two-Body Problem

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to jouissant/[@moontowers](http://moontowers.tumblr.com/) for the beta read, and thanks to [@buck-compton](http://buck-compton.tumblr.com/) for providing some awesome art. [Go check it out!](http://buck-compton.tumblr.com/post/159904133537/artwork-for-the-two-body-problem-by) This work is part of the Easy Co. Big Bang, and you can find the other stories in the collection, so please share the love. 
> 
> Additional warning: Story contains mention of a pregnancy scare/loss, so please avoid or skim if that's troubling to you (it is not a major plot point).

The plane touches down at O’Hare with a bounce that surprises Nix, jolting him out of a deeper sleep than he’d expected. He blinks blearily as the lights come up. He isn’t sure when he passed out, and he’s too tired to do the time zone calculation. Whatever sleep he got wasn’t enough to make up for having been awake for more than 24 hours. He makes his way through baggage claim and customs on autopilot before he sends out a text saying he’s landed.

He’s never been more happy to see Dick’s ancient Corolla, salt stained and ice crusted, than when he steps out of the airport doors at midnight into the biting wind, hauling six weeks’ worth of luggage behind him. Dick gets out of the car to greet him and Nix more or less crashes into his open arms, clumsy with exhaustion.

“Welcome home,” Dick greets him, clapping him in a muffled hug, about eight layers of clothing between the two of them. He releases Nix and grabs his bag, hefting it into the trunk. “You liking the weather?”

“Not much of a change,” Nix admits. Most of his team had fled the South Pole’s waning summer for warmer weather. Only Nix and a few unlucky others had played the depressing game of wagering temperature differences between home and the observatory, which were usually vying about the same.

“Well, we’re due for a foot of snow,” Dick grins at him. “Got back just in time.”

Nix groans and folds himself into Dick’s passenger seat, and Dick threads them away from the airport. The truth is that as much as Nix will moan and complain, he does pretty well at the South Pole. There aren’t a lot of people he misses during the three-month stints. He can tinker away at his telescope to his heart’s content, and he’s never been a creature that relies overly on a circadian rhythm to determine his work hours anyway, nor on sunlight to dictate that rhythm. The cramped quarters don’t bother him, and it’s universally acknowledged that there’s nothing to do in the off-hours but get drunk, so he socializes just fine. Still.

“Civilization at last,” he comments as Chicago’s skyline comes into view, brilliant at night, with the Sears tower visible even from this far out. The sky is cloudy, as it often is in winter, but the thick cover just bounces all the light back, illuminating the city as if it were a movie set. Nix sighs in affection. He does get tired of snow, ice, and the same square buildings for weeks on end.

“Civilization may not be prepared for your return,” Dick jokes gently, and Nix shrugs, letting his eyes slide shut.

“Then civilization should figure out how to let me map the Big Bang from home,” he suggests, but there’s no bite to it. Hell, maybe that would solve all his problems. He could probably face his inevitable return to New Jersey and a manufacturing plant if he could continue his research from his home office. Kathy had decorated it with a heavy antique desk and some art Nix doesn’t hate, and it’s not like the plant itself takes up much of his time. He rolls his head to the side, watching the streetlights flicker over Dick’s face. Of course, there was at least one thing he couldn’t simply pack home to the house in Nixon.

“You need to grab some food?” Dick asks, and Nix shakes his head, tilting his head back and letting his eyes slide shut again. The shock of cold air has unfortunately gone a long way toward waking him, but his eyes are still scratchy with overuse.

“Nah. Home’s good. You still remember the way? I’ve been gone a while.”

Dick smirks a little and doesn’t bother answering. “How’d it go wrapping things up?”

Nix sighs and tries to gather his thoughts. “I think we’re up. We had some high winds the last few days, couldn’t take any observations. But I got all the new gear installed, and I think the new software’s running alright. Would have been nice to have a few solid test nights.  Would have been nice to have a few extra weeks,” he adds. There’s not a lot of time left. His post-doc only has six months to go, and then he won’t have anything but what he packs back to his home office in Nixon. Back to real life. Where, realistically, no one will let him tinker with or use data from a world-class telescope in his free time. He’ll use the office to read about other people’s work, other’s people’s discoveries. And, eventually, Nix knows he’ll stop reading entirely, and the last ten years will be little more than a dream he once had. Nix frowns and tucks his head more firmly against the headrest. It was easier to ignore such thoughts when he was on the frozen white underbelly of the planet.

Dick glances over at him. “Thought you might stop off back east for a few days.”

Nix doesn’t open his eyes. His wife was another thing it had been easier to ignore at the South Pole. “It was already a 26-hour trip. I’ll fly over in a few weeks, once things settle down.” It isn’t like Kathy’s used to seeing him. New Jersey to Chicago is far enough — what’s New Jersey to Antarctica after that? He’ll call her in the morning. He nestles into the seat, his coat pillowing his head. “What did you get up to?”

It feels like Dick hesitates, but when he speaks, his voice is normal. Nix chalks it up to jetlag on his part, muddying his thoughts. “Oh, the usual grant writing fun. Teacher workshops, an undergrad meltdown or two. You say your goodbyes to the penguins?” he checks, and Nix grunts, a smile curving his mouth.

“Took you plenty of pictures.”

* * *

 

Nix is exhausted by the time Dick drops him off with a wave, waiting until he digs his keyfob from the depths of his computer bag and beeps himself into his building. He leaves his duffel in the front hall, dragging his laptop bag a few prized steps further into the bedroom. He heels off his shoes and falls onto the bed, facedown into his pillow.

But the cold had indeed shaken him awake, and his bed is too soft after weeks of the unforgiving bunks at MacMurdo. He rolls over and grabs his laptop. Dick’s stupid question about the penguins is repeating in his head, over and over. It’s probably sleep deprivation, but he’s suddenly emotional about the stupid penguins, with their tendency to parade along the runway, loiter in front of the garages, tying the vehicles up for hours. He’ll never curse them again. Six months left on his grant, and then back to New Jersey. Six months left to work on the instruments he’s been building since grad school, to let the data stream in, analyze it, write it into a paper — there’s not enough time, not nearly enough.

Nix pries his laptop open and logs onto the research network, then jumps on Skype as well. Antarctica is on New Zealand time, and it’s the middle of the day there. He stares at the remote desktop, the readouts from his newly upgraded equipment.

 _Are you seeing the temperature slide?_ he types to Kelsey, who is with the instrument full-time.

 _We’re working on it._ There’s a pause. _Where are you? You just left!_

 _Science waits for no one,_ he types grimly. He sets the first week of data running through the routines on his machine at the university, which takes a while because of course they’d changed the file formats since the last run, and it chokes three times before it finally looks like it’s running. It’s four a.m. by then, and Nix finally feels his brain slowing down, sluggish with sleep. He shuts the lid on his laptop, shoving it under his pillow, and rolls over into unconsciousness.

Six more months.

* * *

 

Nix wakes up late the next morning, the wan winter sun doing little to rouse him. He takes the long, hot shower he’s due after weeks on the ice. But his apartment has no food, so he picks up his computer bag again and heads south. He takes advantage of the midday hour to cruise down Lake Shore Drive, though the parks are barren and white. The lake is cloudy with ice, stretching off to the east.

His desk has been untouched in his absence, the same sticky notes taped to the edges of his monitor, the same xkcd cartoons plastered to the door and walls. He shares the room with Dick, since the university hadn’t deemed either of them worthy of their own space. Nix understands about himself; most of the post-docs share offices. Dick, who runs the programming for the university’s observatory, an historic but still scientifically impressive collection of telescopes in a building like a Greek temple just across the state line, has always seemed deserving of a more lofty office, as far as Nix is concerned. But the university figures that he has an office at the observatory as well, and Dick, not one to stand on privilege, has never argued.

Dick, of course, has been at work for hours, and when Nix enters he pushes himself away from his keyboard with a little stretch.

Nix dumps his bag on the desk, staring at his monitor. “I forgot how big that was. I missed it, and I about chucked my laptop across the room I don’t know how many times. I still forgot how big it was.”

Dick smiles from behind his own, more modestly sized screen. “Sink’s looking for you.”

“Of course he is.” Nix claws a tangle of cords out of his bag. He wants to set his computer here synching after the weeks of inactivity before he starts on what’s sure to be a whole afternoon of catching up with the department. “He sound in a hurry?”

“He always sounds in a hurry,” Dick says with a shrug.

Nix sits down at his desk anyway. But he’s barely logged in when Webster and Malarkey show up to remind him in person of the email he’d let settle at least thirty messages back. Journal club is not the same without him, apparently, and Nix promises to bring something interesting next week. Apparently Peacock has been boring the hell out of them in Nix’s absence.

“He already assigned something about mathematical methods,” Malarkey says, a pained look on his face. “For the third week running.” He glances down the hallway before he leans further into the room. “It’s _astrophysics_ journal club, isn’t it?”

“He is the professor in charge,” Nix says mildly, and Webster shoots him a pleading look. Nix grins, leaning back in his chair. “But I can probably use my triumphant return to swing something cosmology related, if you’d prefer.”

“We missed you, sir,” Malarkey says, and Nix waves a hand at them.

“Get out, I’m still settling in.”

When he glances over, Dick’s mouth is twisted to one side. “What?” Nix demands. “They’re not wrong. It’s supposed to be interesting, not punishment.”

“You wrote me at least three times that one of the South Pole’s great advantages was its lack of students.”

Nix shakes his head. “It was. Peacock’s an idiot. I’m just supposed to leave them hanging?”

Dick glances at the clock and rises. “I’ve got a meeting. And Sink still wants to see you.” Nix grunts, looking back to his work. “I have stew in the slow cooker at home. Figured you wouldn’t have gone grocery shopping yet.” He taps his fingers on the edge of his desk, lingering. “Invite Ron too, if you want.”

Nix looks up. “I’ll be over,” he promises.

* * *

 

Sink is brief, as usual, which is fine with Nix. It would unnerve him to have the department chair too invested in his business as a lowly post-doc. Horton, whose grant Nix technically works under, requires a more detailed check-in, and it’s later than Nix had expected before he’s free to head over to Dick’s place.

Nix leaves his car in the parking deck and walks the half-dozen blocks to Dick’s rental. It’s a cheery stone two-story with neatly trimmed hedges and it bustles with flowers in the summer. In the winter, the snow paints it a stately white, the ivy that twines up the walls providing stark and lovely contrast.

The upstairs is occupied by Florence and Ed, the octogenarian couple who own the house. They’ve been there for thirty years, since before they’d converted the basement into an in-law apartment for Florence’s own mother, deceased some twenty years. Now, Dick not only pays them rent, but does all their yardwork and half their grocery shopping to boot.

(“They feed me dinner every Sunday,” Dick argues whenever Nix starts encouraging him to renegotiate his lease. “And they’ve never charged a pet fee.”

“What kind of monster would charge you for keeping a dog that perfect in their own house?” Nix is usually distracted.)

The truth is that it’s an excellent arrangement for Dick, who is gone long weeks in the summer at the observatory, running camps for schoolchildren, leading teacher training workshops, and hosting star parties with the telescopes both historic and new in the building’s stately twin domes. The observatory’s wide green campus provides acres for a running dog to wear herself out, even if she is confined to his office during the day. He comes back often enough to mow the lawn for Florence and Ed, and they let him pay a reduced summer rate for no reason whatsoever except that Dick, as Nix has long opined, is catnip to old people.

Despite the predicted snow drifting down in the early morning hours, the sidewalks are neatly shoveled when Nix arrives, with sand scattered on the steps and front walk. Nix follows the path around the side and down two steps to Dick’s basement entrance.

He pushes the door open without knocking, and there’s a furious scrabbling of claws on hardwood, the accompanying jingle of a collar, and a merle pile of fur, half fluffy tail, is flying at Nix’s legs.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, dropping to his knees. Abbie buries her face in his armpit, whining and huffing in her excitement.

“I think she missed you,” Dick says.

They eat when Ron shows up a half hour later, and Ron brings a bottle of wine to toast Nix’s return. After dinner Nix ends up on the floor in Dick’s living room, leaning on one elbow next to Abbie, sprawled on her back on her favorite rug. Nix still has his wine glass in one hand, but the other is scratching Abbie’s belly while she wiggles in pleasure.

“Why didn’t you get your own dog?” Ron asks.

“I have a dog,” Nix answers. “Back in New Jersey. He’s with Kathy.”

Ron narrows his eyes. “I know.”

“The whole department knows,” Dick says, in the especially dry way he gets when he’s teasing. He’s been oddly punch drunk the whole night, pleased about nothing in particular, as far as Nix can tell.

Ron raises his glass in acknowledgement of Dick’s words. “I’m saying why not get one here?”

Nix rubs his hand through the snow white fur on Abbie’s chest, rocking her gently from side to side. “I’m leaving soon.”

Ron makes a dismissive noise. “You’ve been here for two years though.”

“I have an apartment.”

“So don’t live in an apartment,” Ron points out, and Nix feels himself growing annoyed.

“Why don’t you have one?”

Ron is unruffled, sipping his wine. “I don’t want a dog right now. If I did, I’d make it happen.”

“Abbie doesn’t mind being borrowed,” Dick says, frowning slightly at the two of them.

“I see that,” Ron says, and smiles down at them. Nix is usually fascinated by how quickly Ron can change, from relentless to relaxed in the span of a moment. Tonight it makes him edgy, and less appreciative than he might be.

“Carwood should have a committee meeting soon,” Ron says, changing subjects abruptly enough that Nix thinks he isn’t being very subtle about his souring mood. “You have some time free next week?”

Nix rolls onto his back and lets Abbie lick his face. “Sure,” he says. “You’re not going to make him cry, are you?”

Ron is affronted, and Nix assures him that Raleigh and Pete had definitely cried after enduring his questioning during their thesis defenses the year prior.

“Rumors say all kinds of things,” Ron tells him, refilling both their wine glasses. Dick catches Nix’s eye, completely straight faced, and Nix smiles back.

* * *

 

When Nix gets to his office on Friday, their door is closed. Nix can see Dick through the paneled window, leaning back in his chair with his desk phone pressed to his ear. Nix opens the door.

Dick glares up at him before he sees who it is, and then he goes back to pressing the phone tightly against his ear. The irritated look on his face doesn’t fade entirely. “Do you know when you’ll be making that decision?” he asks. Nix can’t hear more than a faint murmur through the handset, but Dick grimaces, voice growing tart. “Then do you know when you’ll decide to set a date?”

Nix settles at his desk, keeping his face downturned. Smiling when Dick is angry isn’t a smart move, but Nix can’t help but enjoy seeing him on the warpath. The next time Dick speaks, his voice is calm again, but with a flat tone that doesn’t bode well for any actual improvement in mood. “I’d like to be a part of those meetings. I have a lot of context I can bring to the discussion.”

Nix pulls out his cell phone, checking his messages while Dick listens to whatever the response was, his expression sour. They have a standing lunch date on Fridays, when Dick will allow Nix to lure him off campus and escape the hordes of undergrads, and Nix starts running down the list of places with milkshakes that have earned Dick’s approval. “Okay.” He hangs up the phone without saying good-bye, the plastic connecting to the set with a loud crack.

Nix smirks, raising his eyes. “Did that make you feel better?”

“They won’t tell me if we’ll have programming next year, they won’t tell me that we won’t, they won’t tell me when they’re making a decision about it. I can’t tell if they’re stonewalling me or just incompetent.” He shoves himself back from his desk. “Are we getting lunch? I need to get out of here.”

Nix tosses him his jacket, propelling himself out of the chair with a lurch. “You need to get back here right away? I can take you uptown.”

“I’ve got a meeting at two,” Dick says, and then bursts out again. “It’s like they don’t want the observatory to succeed. Nix, I swear, they couldn’t make it more difficult if they tried.”

Nix puts a consoling hand on his back. The university wants a cornucopia of programming but sends Dick to the four corners of the funding world to pay for it, and Nix has heard variations on this complaint ever since Dick first decided Nix was worthy of receiving his occasionally epic bitch fests. Nix plays his own role, doing his best to cheer Dick up with ice cream and milk.

* * *

 

Kathy calls him two days later, and Nix almost lets it ring. He’s sitting at his desk in the physics building, and he can feel Dick looking at him. He doesn’t silence the phone and he doesn’t answer, and just before it buzzes its way off his desk in a suicidal topple, Dick asks, “You avoiding somebody?”

Nix nudges the phone back from the edge with the tip of his finger, as if it might be hot. “I haven’t called her,” he admits, and Dick frowns.

“Nix,” he starts, and Nix huffs out a sigh.

“I know,” he snaps and grabs up the phone just before it switches into voicemail. “Hey, Kath.”

“Hey.” She sounds surprised, probably at his answer after such a delay. Maybe just at the sound of his voice. She surprises him sometimes, too. Nix thinks he’s nearly forgotten her, and then they talk, and he remembers: _oh. My wife_.

“You make it back okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” he says. “Just jetlagged.”

“Mmh.” There’s a rough, intermittent noise across the line. “How’d it go?”

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Walking Brutus,” she answers, and now that she says it, he can recognize the wind whipping against the phone mic, the faint jingle of a collar in the background.

“How’s he doing?” Nix asks, homesick for the first time since he got back to Chicago. He can picture the shaggy black mutt, prancing proudly down the sidewalk. He loves the snow.

“The dog is fine, Lewis,” she says, and Nix grimaces.

“How are you?” he corrects, and she sighs.

“Fine too,” she acknowledges. “You coming back for a visit anytime soon?”

Nix stares at his desk, at the scribbled over arXiv printouts and three external drives plugged into his ridiculously large iMac, at the whiteboard covered and re-covered in diagrams and snatches of equations. “I’m swamped, here,” he tells her. “I’ve got six months left to wrap everything up. I don’t see how I’m going to take the time off for a trip to New Jersey with all that.” Across from him, he sees Dick very deliberately put in his headphones, turning up the volume on his computer.

“Right,” Kathy says flatly.

“Look, you could fly out here,” he offers. “Come on, I’m about to leave, and you’ve barely seen Chicago.”

“Yeah, the Windy City in January sounds like a beautiful trip,” she says sarcastically, and Nix shrugs.

“I can’t change the weather.”

“It’s not just the fact that I haven’t seen you in six months,” she points out. A car roars by in the background. “You told your father you’d come out for some meetings. It’s going to take you that much longer to get a research division up and running if you don’t lay any groundwork. No one at the company even knows you anymore.”

“I’m so glad you’re turning into my father so I don’t have to. Really takes the pressure off.”

“Believe me, you’ve got that covered.”

Nix sets his jaw. “Look, I’ve got the rest of my life for the company, but when I leave here, it’s gone. I’ve got to concentrate on my research at this point.”

“And the company is the rest of your life,” she argues back. “I don’t know why you’re bothering with the last few months anyway. You finished your trip, right? Why not just wrap up? There’s a thousand other people working on this project, you said yourself.”

Nix stares at his screen, at the bright alternating colors of his code compiler, the blinking cursor at the end of the line. There are indeed a thousand other people, all of them a giant networked team, sprawled across the globe, tracking down the universe’s earliest signals. They’re capable of the work for sure, their own corners of it. “Because my work matters,” he says, feeling in his gut that that’s true as well. Anyone could fill his role at the nitration works. And if the company disappeared tomorrow, a few thousand people would be unemployed, but the world would carry on. He’s uncovering the secrets of the universe.

“You’re not curing cancer, you’re a cosmologist,” Kathy points out, and then there’s a flurry of high-pitched yipping over the phone. “Hang on, there’s a chihuahua trying to pick a fight. I’ll talk to you later.”

He barely has time to say good-bye before she’s hung up, and he tosses the phone to his desk. It lands with a muffled thump of its rubberized case. Nix rolls his neck, staring at the side of Dick’s head. Dick looks over and then pulls out his headphones, turning expectantly.

“You think my dog will even remember me?”

Dick’s expression turns bemused, and when Nix doesn’t say anything else, he turns back to his work, re-inserting his headphones. Nix sighs and does the same.

* * *

 

As with so many things in his life, Nix got into physics mostly to piss off his father.

His sophomore year, he was taking his required science credit, because Yale wanted all their students to be scientifically literate, which meant he should take something about dinosaurs and be done with it. Instead, he took Contemporary Concepts in Physics, because it only met Tuesdays and Thursdays at the civilized hour of 2:30 in the afternoon. Surprisingly, he pulled an A.

It wasn’t that Nix couldn’t produce A-level work. It was more that he’d intentionally avoided doing so since roughly his sophomore year of high school, and the knowledge that he must have cared enough to accidentally invest the effort was unforeseen. He found himself doing extra reading on his own, following up on class material, and more than once lounging on a desk at the end of class, pestering the professor, a Dr. Harlane, for more details. He didn’t realize how deep it went until he was home for break and happened to mention his lab in passing to his father, and Stanhope made an offhand comment about the engineers and eggheads at the company.

It was something about the sneering way he said the words, the immediate dismissal of their efforts, and Nix had borne the brunt of it enough times for his own sake that that night he staked out his hill and prepared for war. By the end of the argument, half a bottle of scotch was gone, Stanhope had declared that if Nix wanted to throw away his future, that was his prerogative, and Nix had foresworn his business degree entirely and declared a major in physics instead.

He let the headiness of the victory—for Stanhope had conceded, make no mistake about it—carry him through until the next registration period rolled around, and Nix realized how many classes he needed to take concurrently in order to graduate on time. He bought himself a case of Vat for fortification and signed up anyway.

The first semester was nearly a disaster, because he hadn’t taken any math since high school. But prep schools were good for something, so at least he wasn’t starting from zero. The next semester he took calculus and a statistics course, because he didn’t understand any of the metrics for uncertainty they were using, the second semester of intro physics, and the major-level astronomy course as well. By then, the work was becoming routine, and he ended up keeping the business major anyway. Besides, they threw better parties than the physics department.

After the initial burst of post-adolescent rage, Nix and his father smoothed over their fight about his major without ever apologizing, as was their way. It wasn’t as if a physics degree couldn’t be useful at a materials and manufacturing company. By the end of Nix’s tenure at Yale, his father had forgotten he’d ever opposed it. He bragged about Nix at parties, advertising the expertise Nix would bring on board one day, and Nix told himself that at least he was doing things his way. Perhaps he had briefly considered being some cutting edge physics researcher, but tweed wasn’t really his style, and what, was he going to let the company lapse into someone else’s hands?

It took him an extra year to graduate, which was not the Yale way, but the late major addition meant it wasn’t wholly disapproved of, and five years for two majors was all right. His last summer and academic year he spent analyzing radio signals from distant galaxies under Harlane’s direction, watching waterfall plots and butterfly plots whispering secrets through his computer screen, and sometimes he thought that physics was maybe for the poets after all.

And then it was all over, and he graduated, and Harlane in particular told him to apply for graduate school. He knew someone at MIT who was looking for a student like Nix to join his research group. But Nix had the family business. It had always been there waiting for him, looming over him. And so he went home to Nixon, New Jersey and assumed his role. His parents threw him a graduation party, mostly their friends, of course, since his were scattered around the globe. One of his father’s friends brought his daughter, Kathy, who also had graduated that year. She had long dark hair and a killer smile, and a shiny new degree in neuroscience. They spent the night getting drunk in the basement and making fun of everyone upstairs.

Seven months later things were going well enough with Kathy that his parents had all but adopted her. She was working part-time in a lab that seemed to center around cutting apart rat brains, and his parents found that fascinating. Nix worked five-hour days and spent most of that scouring the internet on his work computer and staring out his very large windows, taking home a large paycheck for his troubles. He spent his nights either watching TV with Kathy or drinking in bars with her friends or the other VPs at the company. He got an apartment when he graduated, neatly on the other side of town from his parents, and Kathy stayed there more and more nights. Eventually, it seemed pointless for her to renew her lease when it came up. Nix was faintly pleased at the idea. He liked having someone to be his. He liked having someone in his corner at family dinners, someone to share jokes with, someone to kiss goodnight and good morning and at New Years. His only objections were nebulous and indistinct, a vague panic at the idea that settling down should be so easy. Nix didn’t feel settled.

The feeling only intensified when his father, from his own understanding of the situation, raised the idea of a new position for Nix. One that could, in his estimation, support a family.

Nix found himself driving to New Haven and trying to look friendly instead of desperate when he showed up in Harlane’s office at the end of a Friday in December just before the holidays, the wind biting cold into Nix’s peacoat.

Harlane shook his hand warmly and walked him to the bar just off campus and bought him a beer. They chatted about the department and a recent paper Harlane had emailed him that yes, Nix had read, and it was such a relief to find his brain churning through the science again that it steeled his nerves all over for the thing he’d actually come to ask.

“You had a friend at MIT,” Nix said into a break in the conversation, and Harlane studied him over the rim of his glass. He must have remembered Nix’s situation: his father and the company. All the reasons he hadn’t applied for grad school his senior year, despite Harlane’s encouragement. But he didn’t mention any of it.

“Jack has a strong research group,” Harlane said instead. “You’d fit in well. You took the GREs last year, if I remember?”

Nix gulped his beer, nodding. He didn’t think about what his father would say, or Kathy. He was going to die if he stayed where he was, a slow drowning like quicksand in his lungs.

“Well. Then I suppose I’d better write you a recommendation letter.”

His father, predictably, lost his shit. Kathy, much to Nix’s surprise, did not. She seemed to think it was a great joke on his father, whose company never grated on her the way it did Nix, but who she still agreed could stand to be brought down a peg or two. It soothed a lot of Nix’s fears about the whole marriage thing at all, which had been looking like an increasingly poor decision, but this rallied the two of them. Besides, Kathy had friends in Boston.

He spent six glorious years at MIT cracking the secret codes of the universe, reading the birth of the cosmos in the strange twists of the thinnest layers of dust laid down by the earliest moments of time. His wedding, in the summer after his second year, felt almost incidental, overshadowed by his prelim exams that spring and his thesis proposal coming up that fall. He spent half their honeymoon in Paris on their hotel balcony, cursing their lovely but antiquated building’s internet connection and emailing frantically with his collaborators about extinction coefficients.

Kathy spent two days shopping while Nix drank coffee in the echoing halls of the Institut d'Astrophysique, following the twists of conversation in the researchers’ thickly accented English, and when they slipped Nix followed them into their native tongue with his own rusty schoolboy French. The math they sketched out on napkins and chalkboards and whiteboards was the same in any language.

He defended his thesis on a blustery day in March but barely felt the cold, and when he walked out, he was Doctor Lewis Nixon.

Somehow, the title has never stopped feeling a little fake, a little pretentious, like he can only hear it in his father’s mocking tone.

* * *

 

Nix sits at his desk and taps a finger on the keyboard to wake his computer. His programs have been crunching through the latest round of data since yesterday, and they should be done by now. Sure enough, the plots are waiting on his desktop, and he sits down, studying the maps. Visually, they look like every previous map taken by the telescope: odd hatchmarks criss-crossing the sky. The good news is that, after the upgrade, they still look like the previous maps. Nothing has gone disastrously wrong. Any improvements will be below what the eye can make out.

Nix has a long list of routines he’s written and re-written over the past two years. He pulls them up and starts the newly reduced data through them, as he has a hundred times before. He wonders if Kathy’s not right, if it’s not just pride keeping him here. There’s every chance the upgrades still won’t be enough, that the technology to see what Nix seeks simply doesn’t exist yet. Or that their predictions are wrong, and that no matter how hard Nix or anyone else looks, that the signal simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps he would be better off running a company that makes something he could at least see, employs people and runs profits he could take credit for.

But it’s not long before another plot jumps out at him, and this one he notes. Far from the empty noise and jagged plots of flat static he’d expected, his analysis shows patterns, a distinct swirl. Nix leans forward, dragging at the border to increase the image size. Before he’s done, the second plot finishes, popping on top of the first, and then a third.

Nix sits back in his chair. “Holy shit.” 

* * *

 

“Do you trust it?” Ron asks later that night, hands folded around his beer glass.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Nix says, running a hand through his hair for the hundredth time. He’d stared at his results, shown them to Horton, and set the whole dataset running through again, just to double check. He’d emailed his collaborators, most of whom were asleep a day’s worth of time zones away from him. Then he’d called Dick and Ron and headed to the bar. “But it looks like what I’ve been looking for.”

“That’s Nobel Prize territory,” Dick says, and Nix grimaces.

“Not quite.” Though it is up there, and that alone makes Nix’s heart beat faster. It’s why he chose this work to begin with. It’s important. It matters. “And it could still just be a glitch. But wouldn’t that be a coup for the Nitration Works?”

“You’d still leave?” Ron asks. Nix had brought printouts of his discovery, and they lay across the table, staring at him. He takes a drink, covering for the fact that he’s momentarily speechless. It hadn’t occurred to him that this might change the equation. Nothing has, through the years. No matter how much time he gave to his research, the Nitration Works was always waiting for him. He opens his mouth to answer and sees Ron tapping at his phone, not for the first time that night.

“Since when did you become a chatty Cathy?” he asks instead. “My Nobel prize worthy discovery isn’t enough to keep your attention?”

“When you hear from the King of Sweden I’ll be all ears,” Ron promises, slipping the phone into his pocket. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Hell, if I get a Nobel I’ll just retire,” Nix grumbles. “It’s all downhill from there anyway.”

“You’d make a great eccentric recluse,” Ron agrees solemnly. “Very classic.”

“See if I take you on my yacht then,” Nix says. “I was gonna let you be first mate.”

Dick makes a wordless sound of protest, and Nix rocks his shoulder sideways into Dick’s, hushing him. “You get to sit in the prow and be our masthead.” Dick opens his mouth and Nix overrides him. “You can have a spot on the crew when you learn how to pass a man overboard drill.”

Ron grins. “How many times has he let the lifesaver drown?”

“I stopped counting,” Nix says, though by now Dick has started pushing him into the booth’s corner, pinning his arms in order to steal the last of his quesadilla, and his words come out in a fit of laughter. “Listen, you can steal all the food you want, it doesn’t change your seamanship skills.”

Ron laughs and drains his glass, setting it down near the table’s edge. “Well,” he says. “You let me know when we cast off, then. I’ll be there.” He stands. “But I’ve got work to do tonight. Congratulations, Nix. I hope your results pan out.”

Nix catches Dick sharing his thoughtful stare as Ron exits the bar, pulling his phone out again as he steps through the doorway.

“’Work,’ my ass,” Nix comments. “You think he’s meeting somebody?”

Dick narrows his eyes, a sign of agreement. “He’s been shifty for a few weeks,” he reports, and Nix frowns at his drink, wondering what that would look like: Ron with someone more serious than a one-night stand. When he looks up, Dick has shifted back to his side of the booth, picking at the remains of Nix’s quesadilla.   

“It was quiet while you were gone,” he says, and Nix hears it for the admission it is. It hadn’t been a surprise, how much Nix had missed Dick, but he wonders if maybe it was a surprise for Dick. Nix doesn’t have anyone like Dick, but he’s always had people to talk to, people to go out with. It isn’t the routine of Nix’s life that had changed when he met Dick—only everything he felt about that routine. But he isn’t so unobservant that he can’t tell that Dick doesn’t have anyone in place of Nix. Nix likes it, in a jealous, covetous way he knows he shouldn’t feel proud of but does. But he worries about it, too. He worries about Dick, alone with his thoughts once Nix leaves. He needs someone to take him out for milkshakes, and take a walk when he’s been at his work for too long.

Nix has considered it. He can’t take his research with him when he goes, but maybe he could take this, the one thing that might make the rest of it bearable. He has, in fact, daydreamed about it more often than he should, gamed out the logistics of the job that could bring Dick out to New Jersey, the apartment he’d rent down the street, the old haunts Nix would drag him to, the family dinners that would in all likelihood drive him away again.

Nix takes swallow of whiskey and sets his glass back down, tapping the sides, and finally says it out loud. “I could make a job for you in Nixon,” he says flatly. He can’t look at Dick, can’t bear to see whether the look in his eyes is surprise, or gratitude, or outright revulsion at the idea. “It would be all yours: director of community engagement. We’ve never had one, but you could build it from the ground up.”

Dick is quiet for a minute. “You’re really leaving?” he asks. His voice is neutral, and Nix tightens his fingers on his glass. For all that he’s talking about going back home, back to the job he always knew he’d take one day, to his own family, it still feels like stepping out into a chasm, and he’s grasping for any straws of familiarity.

“Thought I might drag you with me,” he offers. He knows there are no telescopes back in Nixon, no astronomy projects at all. But they’re a manufacturing company, and physics and engineering and computer coding and all the other topics Dick tries to encourage in the youth of tomorrow would fit in well. It’s not ideal, and he can’t imagine what Dick would see in it, but he can’t leave without making the offer. The silence drags out, and he takes another gulp of whiskey, feeling it burn down his throat. “Just think about it,” he says hastily, and starts to get up.

Dick reaches out, grabbing his arm. “Lew, wait.” Nix doesn’t fight him, sinking back down, but Dick doesn’t let go of his arm. He takes another minute to formulate his thoughts. “I’m sorry, but you don’t really want this, do you?”

Nix finally looks at him, betrayed. “I’ll miss you more than the damn Bean,” he says scornfully.

“Okay.” Dick accepts this without argument, looking Nix in the eye. “But I meant going back at all. You hate it there, you’re miserable every time you have to go back, and you don’t have any interest in the business itself. You don’t even like it when Kathy visits you here. Why on Earth would you put yourself back there?”

“You don’t have to come,” Nix bites out, trying to stand again. “It was just a suggestion.”

“I’m not talking about me.” Dick’s voice is sharp. “I’m talking about you. If I thought you’d be happy there, I would think about it. Heck, it’d be closer to home for me, too, and my grant won’t extend indefinitely either. But I don’t think that’s what you really want.”

Nix laughs sourly. “Yeah, you figure that out, you let me know.”

“I think we both have a pretty good idea.” Dick stares at him, and Nix feels his chest tightening, his breath coming faster. For one wild second, he wonders if Dick means something else, something somehow even more earth-shattering. But then, “The university’s hiring for next year, right? Tell me that wouldn’t be perfect.”

It’s only marginally less terrifying a suggestion than if Dick had actually offered himself up. “Kathy would kill me. My father would kill me.”

“You can’t live your life for someone else,” Dick says gently. “Not even them.”

* * *

 

He paces across his office, barely seeing the walls in front of him, peering again and again at the plots still emblazoned across half his monitors. His data is holding up to all the checks, but the interpretation of it only makes sense if Kellor’s readings do as well. Kellor, who has been dragging her heels for months, as far as Nix can tell, refusing to actually publish her own paper on the data Nix needs.

“They’re only preliminary,” Kellor tells him, voice tinny through the computer speakers. “We’re still waiting for the first science run to finish. You can’t hurry this stuff, Nix.”

“Of course you can, Carol,” Nix argues. “I’m leaving in August. You really think your data are going to change that much? I got a 5 sigma detection on this thing. It’s a lock. You just need to tell me your final version isn’t going to be wildly off and throw off my historically important discovery here.”

“I don’t know, Nix, that’s what I’m saying.” She peers at him through the Skype window, unflappable. “If I had to guess, I’d say no, it’s not going to change, but I’m not putting my name to the paper if you want to claim it as the final word on the matter. The data’s public. Do it yourself.”

“Believe me,” Nix promises. “I won’t have a problem leaving your name off the paper.”

“Oh, fuck you too,” Kellor says, but there’s no heat to it. She shrugs. “We’re very clear on our protocol. And if you’ve seen the signal, I trust we will too in a few months’ time.”

Nix mulls it over for the next week. But, as even Kellor had said, there’s no reason to think the final version of her data would change from the preliminary, and the preliminary backs Nix up. The experiment had worked. And it won’t do him a bit of good if he can’t prove it until after he’s been denied for a faculty position.

He writes up his results and sends the draft to his collaborators, with his intended timeline. The paper doesn’t have to be accepted, but if he can at least say that it’s in press by the time he submits his application, it’ll be a victory. No sane hiring committee would reject the first person to ever observe the fingerprints of the Big Bang.

He tells Kathy he’s found something amazing.

“Will you finish in time?” she asks.

Nix tells her, honestly, that he isn’t sure, and they change the subject with mutual relief to Blanche’s new boyfriend. Nix is glad someone else seems to be drawing the family’s ire.

He writes out his research goals, lovingly detailing the work he’s been doing, the work he thought he was going to have to cede to dreams. He’s surprised at how quickly the words bloom under his fingertips. He hadn’t realized how much he’d already planned out when he wasn’t watching himself, how many meetings and train rides and showers he’d spent mulling it over when he didn’t think he was thinking about anything. He has a five year plan complete in one long night, a beer at his elbow, and pitches into bed as the sun’s coming up.

* * *

 

Two weeks after his thesis defense, Kathy told him she was pregnant. She wanted to keep it and he didn’t, and they had the biggest screaming match of their marriage, which had never been short on arguments to begin with.

“Look, a third of all pregnancies spontaneously abort anyway, maybe we won’t have to deal with it,” he argued, and she looked like he’d punched her in the stomach. Which didn’t make any sense to Nix, because they were on the pill, so it wasn’t like they wanted a baby anyway. It wasn’t a fucking miracle kid, it was shitty odds and them both being too stupid, despite the plethora of degrees between them, to think about the antibiotics she was on for strep throat.

“You said you wanted kids after your defense,” she hissed, white faced with anger. “You said, after grad school. What is so wrong with this? We’re 28 years old, half my friends have kids. Grow the fuck up, Lewis!”

Things were ugly and unnervingly quiet for about a month until they had another screaming match, because she did get her period again. When Nix responded to the restart of her cycle with a vicious, “Well, good,” she didn’t speak to him for a week — literally, not a word. Nix ignored her and slept in his office more than once. They had another fight when Nix asked if she was going to switch pills. She didn’t.

Nix spent another six months at Nixon Nitration as the new Director of Special Projects. He spent his mornings scrolling through the arXiv and either mocking the results or watching them longingly, sending long emails to Jack at MIT about whether his group had considered this or that. He spent the afternoons terrifying administrative assistants and missing half the meetings he was supposed to attend. Finally, he convinced his father that no one would take him seriously as a scientist until he had some real research experience under his belt, and he applied for a slew of post-docs. He was racking up a bizarre mix of impressive experience and worrying gaps, and he only got one offer, though it took his breath away. Kathy was less impressed, though Nix thought that had little to do with the position, and far more with Nix himself.

“Where the hell is Batavia?” she asked, baffled.

“It’s Fermilab, Kath,” he said. “It’s the place I need to go. Chicago’s only an hour away. I’ll mostly be there anyway, except when I’m traveling.”

“Traveling,” she scoffed. “So I’ll be alone in Chicago, where I don’t know anyone, for weeks at a time. At least when I followed you to Boston or back to New Jersey I had friends there. What’s so wrong with our plans here?” she argued, and Nix felt the same suffocating destiny reaching out for him, coils tightening, that he felt before they got married. He couldn’t stay in Nixon and he couldn’t explain why, even to Kathy. More and more, especially to Kathy.

She didn’t understand, and she put her foot down, and finally he said, “I’m going. It’s only two years, and then I’ll be back. Why don’t you just stay here?”

And she did.

* * *

 

Nix shows up at Dick’s door on a Saturday evening with a deep dish pizza and his teaching vision statement, which is in shambles, and makes Dick read it for him and offer critiques. “This is a terrible breach of etiquette,” Dick grumbles. “I’m the one who’s been giving lectures to the department on teaching practices for the past three years.”

“Yeah, so make me sound good,” Nix says, and Dick drags another slice toward himself and scribbles over Nix’s latest draft with his grading pen. Nix turns on the Cubs game and sinks back onto Dick’s couch, and they pass the evening in peaceful silence, trading the draft back and forth to the rhythm of the innings.

Nix stands stiffly in front of Sink’s desk when he looks his application packet over and then frowns up at Nix. “Here? Son, I’ll write your letter, and I’ll read your application, but don’t you want to try somewhere else? Shit, at least apply for the slot down at Urbana.”

Nix swallows. “Technically I’m still employed at Fermi. I wouldn’t be staying put.”

Sink narrows his eyes at him for a long moment and then shrugs, settling Nix’s application on his desk. “Well, you’ve got a five-star rating from me, you hear? I can’t be on your hiring committee, of course, but I think my letter will still do some good.”

He submits the application packet a week later, feeling almost lightheaded as he clicks the final button. He tells Kathy only after he’s emailed the whole thing off.

Dick finds him in a bar two hours later. He slides onto the stool next to him. “What happened?”

“Like I said.” Nix drains his whiskey. He’d started texting Dick a few drinks in. He’s not sure how many drinks ago that was, though. “Told her I applied for the job. She said I could go to hell. I think she’s serious, Dick. I think she’s gonna divorce me if I don’t go back to New Jersey.” He waves at the bartender, who eyes him warily but slides him another drink. Dick intercepts and pulls it toward him, tucking it behind his elbow where Nix can’t reach it without starting a wrestling match.

“I don’t understand,” he says, ignoring Nix’s look of outrage. “Why tonight?”

“Well I didn’t tell her I was applying until it was done.” Nix tries waving at the bartender again, but she’s ignoring him, clearly letting the two of them sort out his drinking habit.

Dick blinks at him, but he knows Nix too well to be truly shocked. “You don’t think that’s the kind of big life decision you guys should have discussed?”

Nix shrugs and gestures toward his glass. “Listen, you’re not gonna drink that, so why let it go to waste?”

Dick’s frown is stubborn, but Nix knows he always caves in the end, and he’s feeling rotten enough to take advantage of it. “I can at least slow you down,” he points out.

Nix gets up, wobbling only slightly, and simply takes the other empty seat on Dick’s right.

 Dick is too dignified to play keep-away, and Nix takes his drink back, though he hunches over it rather than downing it immediately. It’s petty, but he doesn’t have a lot else going for him tonight. “I thought you were my life coach slash cheerleader slash whatever,” Nix grumbles. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

“That’s called being your friend. And I am happy you applied,” Dick says. “I thought it would be a good choice for you. I didn’t think you’d do it behind your wife’s back.”

“She wants me to go home, inherit the company, have kids. Nothing about staying here on a professor’s salary and flying to the South Pole once a year really works with those plans.”

Dick props one elbow on the bar, tucking his chin into his hand and studying Nix. “So you hate her life plans, and she hates yours. Nix, why on Earth are you married to her?”

“I might not be for long,” he says.

Dick orders a soda and sits with him for two more drinks before he digs Nix’s wallet out of his pocket for him, pays for their drinks, and then pours him into his car. They leave Nix’s in the parking lot, and Dick drives back to his own house, clearly not trusting Nix by himself.

Instead he throws blankets on his couch, along with one of his pillows, and makes Nix drink a glass of water before he’ll leave him alone. He perches on the arm of the couch, a faint frown on his face. “You okay?”

“Am I fucking everything up?” Nix asks, staring at his hands in his lap. Despite Dick’s entreaties to lay down, he knows better. He’s far less likely to puke if he sleeps sitting up.

Dick hesitates, long enough that Nix starts to doze off, lulled by the alcohol and the familiar softness of Dick’s couch, his mother’s afghan plush against his back. “I don’t know,” he finally says quietly. “I don’t think I’ve got the best perspective on this.”

Nix tilts sideways until his head tips into Dick’s side. “Don’t get married, Dick,” he agrees, mumbling into Dick’s shirt. “It’ll just end up like this. Every time.”

For a moment, Dick doesn’t breathe, because Nix can feel the sudden stillness of his muscles, and then he gently shoves Nix back onto the couch, extricating himself. “I don’t doubt it.”

* * *

 

Nix has one more short, loud conversation with Kathy, and then one with his mother that involves crying on both sides. His mother believes she has lost any chance at grandchildren, but more painful are her repeated entreaties that he think about Kathy’s feelings in all of this. Nix’s father asks him if he met another woman, but has less sympathy when Nix tells him he doesn’t want the position set aside for him.

“For fuck’s sake, Lewis. What are you going to do when this one’s over?”

Nix impresses himself by simply hanging up on his father, though it’s less an accomplishment of temper and more that he can’t quite process his father conflating a faculty job at a renowned university with some lackadaisical adventure, like a child with a lemonade stand.

Then he imagines not getting the job, and crawling back to his father with his tail between his legs, and Nix spends the night getting very, very drunk.

In the meantime, his paper ping-pongs between the journal editor, Nix and his collaborators, and his anonymous reviewers. Reviewer One tells him his paper is sheer genius. Reviewer Two delays, and delays some more, and Nix checks his work over until he could recite the data tables in his sleep. It’s bad enough that Dick notices and takes him out to wander the dark sleepy halls of the Shedd Aquarium on dreary spring afternoons, letting the refracted blue light bounce off their faces as sharks curve deadly arcs through the water.

For a month, everything hangs in horrible balance. On a Tuesday, he gets his divorce papers and his faculty appointment on the same day, and decides either way, heavy drinking is appropriate.

He thinks about calling Dick again, but that’s starting to feel like a move he’s overplayed. And besides, what he really wants is to get falling down drunk for a few weeks until he stops feeling like his life is coming apart at the seams. Dick is unlikely to indulge that kind of behavior.

Instead he calls Ron, who isn’t the most sympathetic companion, but will drink steadily with him. “Did she really break your heart?” Ron asks when half the bottle is gone. “Or was it a relief?” Ron has kept up with him, drink for drink, but doesn’t look any different than normal, watching Nix through dark, expressionless eyes.

Nix feels frayed at the edges, but whether that’s the alcohol or just his life these days is anyone’s guess. He lets out a breath of laughter. “It can’t be both?”

Ron smiles. “You’re a goddamn softy, Nix.” He fills both their glasses again, and clinks his against the glass in Nix’s hand. “Cheers. To your new life.”

When Nix wakes up the next morning, Ron has stolen his backup bottle of booze and left him a note, on top of which sit a bottle of aspirin and the biggest Nalgene Nix owns: _Take a shower. And drink this all._

Nix swallows the pills and makes a dent in the water, and afterward he feels a little less like he’s been hit by a truck. He spends the day on the couch anyway, watching mindless TV and dozing, until someone knocks on his door in late afternoon. “Nix?” Dick’s voice calls through the door, and Nix considers burrowing under the blanket and not responding. Ron must have given him up. But sure, Nix is the softy.

“Yeah,” he finally calls back, a little croaky still. He swings his legs off the couch and hopes he’s past the point of puking. “Gimme a minute.” He stands and his head swims for a moment but then it clears, and his stomach feels queasy but unlikely to turn itself inside out anymore. He makes his way to the door in his boxers and a tee shirt and pulls it open.

Dick eyes him, a concerned crinkle in his forehead. “Hey.” Even in the artificial lights of the apartment hall, his hair gleams coppery and shiny, and he looks put together in jeans and a simple blue tee shirt. He has some shopping bags in his hands that Nix is too exhausted to be curious about.

Nix sighs, the contrast between his own catastrophic mess and Dick’s perpetual tidy nature too familiar by now to worry about, though this is an extreme. “Hey,” he says, stepping back and allowing Dick entry.

Dick follows him in, letting the door drift shut behind him. He sets his bags down, looking around the room and taking in the tumblers still sitting on the coffee table, the blankets strewn across the couch. “You okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Nix settles back into the cushions again, crossing his arms across his chest. “Kathy served me divorce papers, she’s keeping the house, the dog — _my_ dog,” he points out, voice rising dangerously. Dick just drifts down onto the arm of the sofa, watching him. Nix takes a quick breath, getting control of himself. “Ron called you?”

“He told me what was happening,” Dick confirms. “Lew, why didn’t you call me?”

Nix shakes his head. He can’t really explain. He doesn’t know if Dick ever still thinks about it, the aborted flush of their first meeting, but lately Nix finds himself dwelling on it more than he thinks is healthy. He can see how the whole melodramatic scene would play out if Nix lets himself wander down that path in this state of mind, and it seemed simpler to cut it off at the root. Now that Dick is here, his steadying presence almost makes Nix feel worse, paints a stark contrast with Nix’s general disaster of a life. “I don’t know,” he says, and Dick doesn’t push him.

“I brought dinner. Soup. Ron said you might not be up for much, but you should still eat. Did you drink enough today? Water?”

And Nix drops his head into his hands, tears pressing at his eyes. “You know,” he says, throat tight. “When I got sick my last year in grad school, Kathy just moved into the spare bedroom so she wouldn’t catch it too. I might as well have been living by myself.”

Dick doesn’t respond immediately. The mute buzzing of the TV is the only sound in the room. “Last year, at the conference in Seattle,” he says finally. “We were there for ten days. You didn’t call her once.”

Nix shakes his head again, not lifting it. “I didn’t have anything to say.”

He hears Dick shift on the couch, and Dick’s hand lands gently on the top of his head, fingers threading through his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I don’t understand,” he admits, sounding frustrated. “But I am sorry.”

Nix lets out a breath that’s almost, but not quite, a sob, pushing his head into Dick’s fingers. “I don’t get it either,” he says, raising his head at last. Dick lets his hand slide away, and he studies Nix carefully, until Nix has to look away, feeling raw and overexposed.

“Let’s eat,” Dick suggests. They do, sitting side-by-side on the couch, Dick mainly filling the conversation with stories about his sister, who’s living on her own in New York City and terrifying their parents. Nix is only so much help, because while he can vouch for all the better neighborhoods in New York, his own experiences there are not the most reassuring. Nix stands at the end to throw away the take-out containers, and Dick takes them out of his hands. “I’ll clean up. Why don’t you get a shower?”

Nix had not followed that part of Ron’s advice, so he trudges down the hall. He actually does feel better when he emerges, trading up his boxers for sweatpants and a clean shirt. He’s relieved to see Dick perched on the couch. He’d been worried Dick would have snuck out while he was getting clean, and the one thing Nix knows he doesn’t want right now is to be alone. But Dick just turns to smile at him encouragingly.

Nix sinks back down on the couch, and cracks a smile in spite of himself at the tall glass of water Dick pushes at him. Predictable. “Wanna watch a movie or something?”

Nix flips through channels until he finds _Spaceballs_ on TV. Because it turns out everything Dick knows about relationships and breakups he learned from Ally McBeal, he’d brought ice cream. He detours into the kitchen and then resettles close to Nix, pushing a spoon toward him. Nix eats about four bites, sweets not being his vice of choice. Dick eats his own bowl and Nix’s too, when it starts to melt, spooning it up without taking his eyes off the screen.

They’re running a marathon or something, because _Spaceballs_ fades without a pause into _Blazing Saddles_. By that time, Nix has slouched down so he’s propped up only enough to see the screen clearly, his head drifting sideways to lean on Dick’s shoulder. He wonders if Dick will leave, but he only reaches over to place the now-empty bowl on the coffee table, and then settles back among the cushions.

Nix drifts off at some point and when he wakes up again, Dick is turning off the TV on the credits to _Men in Tights_ , and throwing a blanket over Nix’s legs. “You leaving?” he slurs, voice heavy with sleep.

“I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” Dick promises. “Hang tough.” He squeezes Nix’s arm, and Nix doesn’t remember hearing the door close behind him.

* * *

 

Dick had asked Nix out, once upon a time.

Not long after they’d met, still practically strangers, but Nix had been drawn to Dick from the start, even as it became apparent they had nothing in common. Nix’s eyes had followed him at every staff meeting, and Nix found himself gravitating toward Dick at every gathering. Dick  learned, in surprisingly short order, that he had merely to turn his head to find Nix, mutter his dry remarks in the face of Sobel’s neverending speeches to earn Nix’s appreciative laughter. Nix didn’t think too hard about it, just knew that Dick was something Nix liked very much, and Nix wasn’t much about denying himself the things he liked.

Nix had drawn up behind him on his way into the stairwell one afternoon, swooping in close. “Going my way?” he’d joked, low in Dick’s ear, and Dick had turned to face him, a wry but pleased smile lighting his face.

“Come out on a date with me already,” he’d responded, as if it were a done deal.

And Nix, because he honestly hadn’t realized what he was doing, stumbled back against the wall of the narrow hallway. Because Dick hadn’t misread anything, but — “I’m married,” he’d choked out, and Dick actually did a double take, laughing at him for a split second before he realized Nix was dead serious, and then he flushed deep red.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, eyes wide, and Nix had stared back at him in something like horror, his own eyes even wider.

“No, it’s...” _I don’t wear a ring_ , he could have offered, or _I was absolutely flirting with you_ , but instead he just said, “It’s fine. No harm, no foul.”

And Dick, still bright red, had just shaken his head. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated. “I would never have —”

“Dick, please leave it,” Nix had begged. “It’s fine.”

Nix had hovered awkwardly for a few weeks, catching himself, forcing himself to keep his distance. He loved his wife, or at least they were working on it, and besides, the more he knew Dick, the more he knew that Dick wasn’t going to help anyone cheat. And then Nix forgot to be chilly, but once his embarrassment passed, Dick was only himself, bitingly sarcastic and endlessly kind and still bafflingly receptive to Nix’s tendency to barge in on him at all hours and inflict his endless opinionated rants and theories.

Without trying, Nix had a best friend, and if he never quite forgot that first rush of their acquaintance, if Dick’s blue eyes still caught him by surprise sometimes, he counted on Dick to keep things in their place. He was married, and even if he forgot sometimes, Dick could never.

* * *

 

Nix drags into his own lab meeting ten minutes after the hour. The students are all there, because this is actually far from the first time Nix has been late for his own meetings. The downside is that they’re mostly graduate students, and they know him. Malarkey exchanges looks Webster and ventures, “How you doing, Nix? You don’t look so hot.”

“It was a long weekend,” Nix allows, unpacking his laptop and plugging it in.

Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s actually Wednesday that makes Malarkey push further, “You been sick or something?”

Nix laughs sourly. “I’m getting divorced.”

Total silence meets his reply, and he glances up to see David and Don exchanging a silent but frantic conversation with their eyes.

“You’re married?” Liebgott squawks, and the entire lab, his students and the Lab Techniques class using up the other end of the classroom, all take this as their excuse to stop pretending they weren’t paying rapt attention. He finds a triple row of faces staring at him in a range of confusion and surprise. Nix just glares at them, because it’s obviously not for long now, and Joe at least has the grace to look embarrassed at his outburst. “You don’t wear a ring,” he shrugs, dropping his eyes.

“So I don’t wear a ring,” Nix snaps, because he’s been down this conversational path with Kathy, with Dick, with his mother, more times than he can count. It’s always the same, the slight suspicion, the prodding. He’d tried, back when they’d first gotten hitched. He always forgot, came close to losing it more than once, and finally he’d taken to leaving it in the medicine cabinet.

His father’s questions had always been the worst though. “No ring, huh?” he’d ask whenever Nix visited, like he hadn’t asked a half dozen times before, and always with that knowing, smug smirk, the one Nix hates more than anything, the one he himself has perfected. His father’s son, indeed.

It wasn’t some elaborate plan, a seedy attempt to pick up women or step out. He just forgot. He didn’t wear jewelry, never had, and the metal band was heavy on his finger, he slammed it into doorframes, and it had just seemed easier to leave it off most days. Now, it feels like an omen, but it had just seemed practical at the time. But it’s harder than ever to explain, and now it definitely sounds shady.

“Sorry, Nix.” Malarkey is the first to recover. “I guess we didn’t know you were married.”

“Yeah,” Webster laughs, overloud and nervous. “We all kinda thought you and —” Liebgott steps heavily on his foot, and David shuts up. Nix decides not to think about that too carefully.

“Well, shackled no more.”

“You okay?” Malarkey ventures, and Nix waves him off.

“Fine. I want you guys to explain to me why I found sixty lines of code checked in without any comments whatsoever. I’ll delete it next time,” he threatens, and this seems to cow—or anger—them enough to stop their worried looks.  

He throws himself into paper revisions at night instead of getting drunk, because Reviewer Two is a dick, but a dick who’s going to publish his paper. He sends it back for a second round of revisions.

* * *

 

Before long the undergrads are dispersing for summer break, the seniors disappearing forever. Usually it’s a time to lose himself in research, without any students around. But this summer, he finds himself writing lesson plans and cursing himself for ever thinking this was a good idea. He could have applied directly to Fermi, or switched tracks and gone to Germany. Maybe he’s not made out for this, but it’s physics, dammit, and it’s not the nitration works, and he’ll be damned if he’ll give it up now.

June is brutally hot from the first week, muggy and everything Nix hates about this part of the country. Dick fled with the undergrads and is up in Wisconsin almost every day, running summer camps and star parties and making himself generally unavailable for Nix’s amusement. Nix drives the hour and a half up to Lake Geneva just to see him once in a while.

He’s not sure what the rest of the staff thinks when they keep stumbling across him with his feet up on Dick’s desk, spreading his work across the heavy antique desk with a proprietary air. When he and Abbie get tired of the office, he takes her for long walks by the lake, or throws her faded tennis ball across the smooth lawn, enjoying the shouts of the campers, though he’ll catch hell from Dick later for distracting them. If Dick is working especially late, Nix cooks dinner in the little cottage on the grounds that is Dick’s when he stays. He sneaks Abbie table scraps until Dick finishes stowing the telescopes and locking up and wishing every single fucking person good night. And finally Dick walks the quarter mile down the path, his way lit only by the light from the moon overhead, and they eat dinner on the porch, lit by flickering candlelight, though half of them are Citronella.

“Almost European style,” Nix teases him. The air is cooler in the woods by the lake, and if the bugs aren’t too bad then Nix has a drink or five while Dick decompresses from the long days. The stars are bright enough to hurt.

When he’s not trailing after Dick, Nix is busy trying to figure out what needs to be wrapped up before he officially changes roles, and what he can continue without interruption. He sleeps on the sofa in the physics lounge more than once, running experiments late into the night, because everyone tells him that once classes start, he won’t have any time at all. But mostly because what else is he going to do? Dick is in Wisconsin, and Ron has gone mysteriously AWOL since graduation. Technically, the professors are free for their own pursuits when classes aren’t in session, but few disappear as completely as Ron Speirs.

By the end of June, Nix is lonely in more ways than one. He feels unmoored. Always, up until now, he’s had the specter of the rest of his life to drive him, felt like he was working toward something, or against the clock. His parents and Kathy hadn’t understood why he had to throw himself at physics, why he wasted time on the extra years of school and remote observatories and taking half the pay he could have had at the company with his name on it. But they’d satisfied themselves that he would wash back up on their shores, that against all odds, he had the family situation settled out, and would return to them. It had been a constant Nix himself had depended on as well.

He has the job any researcher could wish for, and none of the rest of it: his wife gone, his mother barely speaking to him, his father by turns angry or condescending or dismissive, clearly still under the impression that Nix might yet crawl back begging for a job, disbelieving that his son might be grown enough to have his own desires.

Nix won’t, but the shadow of his father’s face when Nix looks in the mirror haunts him, and he doesn’t quite trust himself either. What if it’s not worth it? What if he reached the prize, and his parents were right, about Kathy, about a family in general? He wonders if he’s thrown it all away.

On his bad nights, sitting alone with a bottle of Vat, he thinks about Dick as if it could possibly work. If Dick could ever retain patience for a partner the way he does for a friend he can simply ignore when Nix gets too sarcastic, too bitter, too drunk. He wonders if Dick would still find him so amusing when he can’t escape him at the end of a long night. He thinks of Dick’s dreams for a country home, and thinks he’d go crazy trapped in the boondocks in Wisconsin for longer than a weekend.

On his best days, when the breeze blows gently over the lake and the sun is more gentle with him and he hasn’t hit the Vat quite so hard the night before, he thinks about Dick as if it might possibly work, thinks about late nights on the porch under the stars, which look close enough to reach out and grasp, and thinks, _maybe._ But when Dick knocks his feet off his desk and collects him for the night, Nix shuts his mouth hard on any questions. He’s jumped off enough bridges for one year as it is. 

When he crosses aisles at the grocery store for the third time with a pretty blond woman who starts to smile at him and mock him for his boxed mashed potatoes, he calls it fate and turns up the charm. Allie is fair where Kathy was dark, short to Kathy’s height, and she talks enough to fill in all the terrifying silences Dick leaves around the edges of their conversations these days, silences where a man might let almost anything slip out.

He takes her to dinner and lets her talk about her vet practice, takes her back to her house and drowns out some of the awful silence with the warmth of another body. She kicks him out a little after two, and he makes it as far as his own couch, sinking down into sleep without another thought.

* * *

 

Dick comes back to town for the weekend, and they meet for brunch, The Egg and I crowded but the bottomless mimosas worth it, at least for Nix. Dick, as usual, humors him. They huddle together in a booth, feet occasionally bumping together while they eat their food.

Dick tucks into his pancakes with more enthusiasm than Nix can muster. His stomach hurts, or maybe it’s his head. The coffee is good but it isn’t helping. He takes another sip anyway. “Where were you last night?” Dick asks around his food. “I called. I thought you might want to watch the game.”

Nix shrugs. “I went out.”

“Hey, that’s great.” Dick’s voice is mild but his smile is genuine. Nix figures he and Dick’s high schoolers probably react about the same to overly saccharine encouragement. “Good for you. What’d you get up to?”

And maybe this is what he’d been waiting for all morning, because his stomach twists again, and he keeps his eyes on the cup. “Allie, this girl from the grocery store, wanted to go out for dinner.” He may not be able to keep Dick’s eyes, but he’s watching like a hawk from his peripheral vision, and he sees the moment when Dick stops chewing, watching him in surprise. He swallows after a minute, then puts his fork down.

“Oh.” He picks up his fork again, but he doesn’t take a bite, just stabs his pancakes a few times. “How was it?”

Nix shrugs again. He takes another swallow of coffee. “Fine. You really wanna hear the details?”

Dick’s cheeks go red. “No.”

The rest of brunch is uncharacteristically quiet.

* * *

 

After that first morning, though, Dick seems to forget anything strange had happened. Nix does make it over to his house for the Cubs game that weekend, and they grill out on his tiny patio and things are like they’ve always been. Ron, though still absent, at least sends a text with his regrets. Nix still thinks he catches Dick watching him sometimes, when he’s just puttering around, but then, hasn’t Dick always done that?

He calls Allie again, sometimes when Dick’s up at the observatory and not around, and sometimes on days when Nix has spent entirely too many hours staring at the red patch of skin on the back of Dick’s neck where he’d forgotten sunscreen. It’s probably not healthy, but she’s funny and bright and he thinks that if he keeps trying, maybe it could become something healthy. Maybe he’s just passing the time. Mostly he’s lonely, and she usually answers when he calls, so he figures things could be worse. 

* * *

 

In mid-July, Nix finally gets the email he’s been waiting for and practically runs across campus to Dick’s house, since he’s home this week. He pushes open the door with his usual lack of ceremony or knocking. There’s a faint scuffle from the living room at the end of the hall, and the normal clatter of Abbie’s hasty approach. Nix barely stops to fondle her ears, already moving down the hall. “Hey, you there? I’ve got news.”

“Um — Nix, hold up, I’ll be out in a minute,” Dick’s voice calls back hurriedly, but Nix is already rounding the corner. He stops dead.

Dick is standing in the middle of the room, fumbling to do up his shirt. But the real showstopper is the cranky, bewildered blond eying Nix over the back of the couch. A blond _man_ , Nix’s brain helpfully clarifies, and while he’d known this in theory about Dick, he finds it changes the meaning when the fact of it is literally staring him in the face.

Dick looks up, and his face is red, whether with embarrassment or something else, Nix can’t be sure. His hair is sticking up in spots, and he rubs a hand over it self-consciously, eyes darting to Nix and away again. The stranger is alternating between staring at Nix and staring at Dick, and he’s — Jesus, he has a hickey welling up on his neck, and Nix isn’t capable of dealing with that on any level. He drags his eyes back to Dick.

“Sorry,” Nix says, dazed. “I just thought I’d swing by.”

“It’s fine,” Dick mutters, cheeks still flaming. “You didn’t know.”

“It’s your place,” Nix protests. “I shouldn’t have just walked in, that was —” he cuts himself off. It was presumptuous, he was going to say, but what about his and Dick’s relationship isn’t, at this point? He walks in on Dick unannounced all the time, is the problem, and he doesn’t like the sudden idea that he shouldn’t.

“Hi,” the interloper says at last, eyes still bouncing between Nix and Dick as if he’s watching a tennis match. “What’s happening here?”

Dick crosses and uncrosses his arms, waving one hand in the air. “Harry, meet my friend Lewis Nixon. Nix, this is Harry Welsh. We _were_ on a date.” He blows out a breath, sounding less accusatory and more frustrated.

Harry jerks his chin forward in a greeting, though he still looks suspicious. “Hi, Nix.”

Dick shakes his head. “What was your news?” he asks, turning back to Nix.

Nix stares at him, though mostly, he’s still staring at the hickey, and the knowledge that Dick did that, that his quiet, buttoned-up best friend is capable of — “My paper got accepted,” he says, and even as Dick’s face lightens, he chokes out, “I’m going to get out of here,” before he can go any further. “Nice to meet you, Harry.” He doesn’t really care if it sounds genuine.

“Lew, that’s great. Look, you might as well stick around, we’ll celebrate.”

“That’s,” he chokes out a laugh, “really alright.” He’s already backing down the hall. He turns and flees, and Dick doesn’t follow.

* * *

 

Nix calls Allie again, trying not to feel competitive about it. She doesn’t seem to register that anything is wrong, but then, he realizes, she barely knows him. How would she? He tries to stay the night, avoiding his own house, but she wakes him up a little past one a.m. and kicks him out. He’s not that much of a coward, so he drives himself back home and waits for the inevitable.

Dick shows up on his doorstep the next day, stiff-shouldered and grim. Nix backs up, letting him in. He turns back to the couch, feeling Dick follow behind him. But there’s static on their line, their usual easy attunement suddenly lost, and he fumbles for something to say, and doesn’t say anything. Dick watches him, worried, and Nix realizes too late that saying nothing was the worst possible option.

“You knew I was gay,” Dick says, and the slight hurt in his tone takes Nix’s breath away more than the belligerence overlaying it.

“That’s not it,” Nix says immediately, though it’s not entirely beside the point.

“Then what?”

Nix shrugs. “I’m a selfish bastard,” he says, and that’s true on a few different levels. “Not used to sharing you, is all.”

He risks a look up, and Dick’s face is still in the way he gets when there’s too much going on to reach the surface. After a moment, it clears into something simpler. “That’s not how I would have chosen to introduce you,” he admits, lip twitching in an olive branch smile.

The room is eerily quiet, the roar of traffic beyond the windows muted for the moment, the fridge and air conditioning silent. “Yeah,” Nix agrees, just to keep the conversation going. “Sorry,” he continues, because even if he’s compromised on the matter, debauched had been a good look on Dick, and if he’s not brave enough to take the plunge himself, he’s not spiteful enough to hold it against Dick for wanting some good touch. “Hope I didn’t ruin your night.”

“It’s fine,” Dick says, and Nix is grateful that no more details are forthcoming. “I’d like you to actually meet sometime. Come over for dinner tomorrow?”

And Nix can’t really say no.

* * *

 

He’s prepared to hate Harry anyway, the armistice between him and Dick aside. Nix’s plan is to make nice for one night, prove he’s not a shitty friend, and then return to actively despising the man who dared to occupy Dick’s time.

When he walks into the backyard, Harry is crouched down and engaged in a ferocious game of tug-of-war with Abbie, growling louder than she is, and Nix can’t even dislike him.

“Hear you’re gonna win a Nobel,” Harry says when he sits down next to Nix, and they’re off. Harry teaches high school physics, and he’s fascinated by Nix’s work. Nix finds himself carrying the conversation along while Dick sits in quiet apparent contentment.

As he reminds Harry, he probably won’t win a Nobel, but he’s signed up for a fair amount of press with the university anyway, and Sink keeps finding new papers and podcasts for him to talk to about the research. It looks good for the whole department, even if Nix was technically still employed by Fermi when he made the find. They have him talk to their PR person as well, and it keeps Nix busy for at least a week or two.

The three of them hang out together a few more times, Harry and Nix vying for awkward third wheel depending on the night, and then there’s one night when Dick is up at the observatory and Harry asks Nix to meet him at the bar after work.

Nix goes, half because he’s grown grudgingly fond of Harry, and half because he’s worried Harry has something he wants to say to Nix without Dick around, and Nix is pretty sure he knows what that might be.

But when he shows up, Harry is just Harry, and there’s a beer waiting for Nix at the bar, and Harry’s first words are only, “Jesus, Nix, you ever wanna just slap a student with their own homework?”

Nix grins, sliding into the open seat. “I don’t have students. Still a post-doc for a few more months.”

Harry waves a hand. “Whatever. You have minions though, right?”

Nix laughs, his mood lightening. Harry does that, much as Nix still wants to find him irritating. “It’s actually in my contract that we can’t call them that. But yeah. Sure. It’s less homework and more sections of code that break everything I’ve done so far.”

“So this kid comes in,” Harry agrees, “And they’re in high school, let’s remember, for Christ’s sake. Nearly adults.”

Nix folds himself over the bar and leans in with a grin. “From what I can tell, there’s your first mistake.”

“No shit. So Darren isn’t the most popular kid, but today, he’s got this crowd around him. This is my homeroom section, by the way. It’s 8am, all they gotta do is listen to some announcements, let me take attendance. And I ask what’s so interesting.” He waves his hand, heading off Nix’s interruption. “I know, second mistake.”

Nix takes a swallow of his beer, amused.

“And half the kids scatter, and half of ‘em tell me it’s nothing, so you know it’s something. And before I can even get up, Hayden, who’s a little shit anyway, yells, ‘Mr. Welsh, he’s got a lobster!’”

Nix nearly spits the beer back out. “A live loster?”

“No, thank Christ, or getting rid of it would have been even more of a pain. I don’t know what I would have done with a live lobster. But a real one. I guess his parents had it for dinner or something, and he took the shell and claws and shit and glued it all back together — he used pipe cleaners to make it the right shape, I mean, he was _dedicated_ on this.”

This makes Nix laugh harder than the original reveal. “Did you confiscate it?”

“It stunk to high heaven. Of course I took it. You think anyone would have gotten work done that day? Already it was every class I had that day: ‘Mr. Welsh, did you take Darren’s lobster?’” He shakes his head. “I became a villain in five minutes flat. Darren never had a better day though.”

“He’s got a future in museum exhibits,” Nix notes, and Harry rolls his eyes.

Harry surprises him by grabbing him in a quick hug when they get up to leave a couple hours later. Nix isn’t used to the casual affection, but Harry doesn’t look like he means anything by it. He just squeezes Nix to him with a pat to the back, and says, “Call me if you get bored. Dick’s gone a lot these days, and he’s a crappy drinking buddy anyway.”

“Don’t I know it,” Nix replies, and Harry has released him by the time he thinks to hug him back. “Thanks, Harry,” he says honestly. “Have a good night.”

* * *

 

But a week later, Nix has an especially bad night, and ends up sitting on the floor in front of his couch, phone pressed to his ear but slipping down his cheek. Allie had an emergency surgery at her vet clinic, and Ron had, of all things, a date with someone he won’t tell Nix about. Which convinces Nix that even Ron, who he loves, but who makes students cry and is a generally scary person, has found someone special, while Nix drinks alone with his half-finished lesson plans.

Dick’s voice is worried over the line, but he’s not _here_ , he’s in fucking Wisconsin, and Nix is really starting to hate that state.

“Nix, please just tell me: Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m not okay,” Nix snorts. “You’re the only good thing in my entire life.”

“That’s not true,” Dick says sharply. “How much have you had?”

The background chatter coming through Dick’s line suddenly drops, and Nix knows he’s stepped into his office, hauled shut the ancient and heavy wooden door. There was a star party tonight, Nix thinks. Or maybe just a party. Is it the end of a week? It might be the closing night for one of the summer camps, all the parents there to pick up tired kids and macaroni art and drawings of sunspots or Lego robots or whatever the theme is this time.

“You could come find out.” He’s too drunk not to make it sound like a come-on when that’s all he can think about. What the fuck was he doing with Allie? Why the fuck hadn’t he just said, on any night down by the lake —

“I’m calling Ron.”

“Ron’s on a _date_ ,” Nix tells him, appalled all over again.

“I—really?” Dick asks, and even in his stupor, Nix understands. _Not you, too_ , he’d asked earlier that evening.

Dick is silent, chewing silently through this.

“I’m working. And don’t you dare drive up here like that,” he adds in the same breath. Nix is hurt. He doesn’t drive drunk. Alright, okay, so sometimes he drives after drinking, but never when he’s _drunk_. He could probably drive now, for instance. He stays slumped on his couch, though. He’s too tired to get up and check. “Just — stay there,” Dick tells him, and hangs up.

A half-hour later, he has to stumble to his feet anyway to answer the door for Harry, who stands smiling cheerfully back at him.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Nix grunts, leaning on the doorway. That’s probably not true. He’d been hoping, against the physical impossibility of Dick driving down from Wisconsin that quickly, on top of the even less likely idea that he would drop all his responsibilities to drunk-sit his friend, that it would be a certain redhead at his door. The disappointment doesn’t hurt less for its inevitability.

Harry claps him on the shoulder, maneuvering them both inside. “Who said anything about a babysitter? Maybe I just wanted to watch HBO.”

He picks up Nix’s glass from its perch on the coffee table and drains it, in exactly the way you shouldn’t with fine whiskey. Then he fixes Nix a glass of water and turns on Entourage.

Nix stares at the screen for a long time, not seeing the show. He has that drifting, drunk feeling that should feel good, but instead just makes him awash in a sea of misery. “I should hate you,” Nix says, after a period where he may or may not have drifted off for a while. He doesn’t look over. Maybe Harry is asleep too. Maybe Nix didn’t say it out loud. 

Harry’s hand lands on his shoulder, squeezing, and his voice is sympathetic. “I know, buddy.” 

* * *

 

Nix catches up with Dick in mid-August when the last of the camps clear out, and Harry takes off for a family reunion back east. Nix brings Abbie a beef bone for the occasion. Dick sets Nix up with a stool across the kitchen bar. “Take a seat if you like. It shouldn’t be long.”

Nix wanders restlessly while Dick busies himself with the stove and oven and two timers that go off almost simultaneously. Dick has a stack of library books on the edge of the counter that he flips through, mostly history or exploration types, and a Michael Chabon that brings him up short with a rush of warmth, because he remembers recommending it to Dick weeks ago. He glances up, but Dick is frowning dubiously down at something in the oven, so he holds his thought and replaces the book in its stack, tracing the cover lightly with his fingertips.

He moves on to the desk nestled up in front of the wide window looking out into the backyard. Its surface is strewn with stacks of papers, the topmost stack scribbled over in red ink, and Nix lifts it curiously. He expects it to be a student’s assignment of some kind, and he’s surprised to read instead budget numbers and program descriptions. Big budget numbers.

“Are these grant proposals?” Nix asks out loud.

He’s already paging through, speed-reading the introduction and then flipping to the meat of it when Dick calls back a harassed sounding, “What?”

Nix lets out a low whistle, seeing the numbers in the final summary. “Not small potatoes. Dick...” he trails off in confusion, looking up to where Dick has leaned over the counter, seeing the moment when Dick’s face changes from annoyance to faint guilt. “You could pay for a thousand summer camps with this funding. What are you looking for this kind of money for?”

Dick’s mouth quirks sideways. “It might be a shade of paranoia,” he warns. Another timer goes off, and he silences it, then casts around before locating a strainer, raising his voice to carry. “I just don’t like the way the last few staff meetings have gone. They’re sounding apprehensive lately. They keep asking about revenue streams, donations. It’s—” he frowns, returning the spaghetti to its pot. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“So you think, what?” Nix leans against the counter. “They’re cutting observatory funding altogether?”

“I don’t know,” Dick admits. “It’s a famous piece of history, but that won’t save it. They’ve shuttered observatories before. Not one quite like this, but...” he shrugs, frustrated. “We don’t have research there anymore, it’s all outreach, and it’s a lot of staff and programming to support, not to mention the building itself. We’re not that big a department.”

“Excuse me,” Nix disagrees. “We’re a cutting edge department.”

Dick rolls his eyes, passing Nix plastic shakers of Parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes over the counter. “Okay,” he allows. “We’re not a department overflowing with funding resources, then.”

Nix can’t disagree there. All his funding is carefully apportioned, and he doesn’t know many for whom that’s not true. Most of his funding, in fact, comes from larger collaborations, not anything easily diverted to an historic observatory, even if it wasn’t already allocated to various other researcher salaries. Except that most of the federal money came with agreements to perform community outreach and engagement of some time, and the observatory was an ideal pre-established site through which Nix thought plenty of the department operated.

“I thought you were funneling everybody else’s broader impact money,” Nix reminds him, and Dick shrugs again, helplessly.

“I can’t rely on that indefinitely, and we’re getting less every year. Especially as the department shifts away from astronomy and more toward cosmology and physics, which don’t square as well with observing based activities. No offense,” he adds, glancing up, and Nix raises his eyebrows.

“None taken.”

* * *

 

With the start of classes, the building suddenly seems three times smaller. The halls which had been echoingly quiet all summer, suddenly swell with noise, at nearly all hours. Nix has to remember all over again to time his movements to avoid the class changes, the flooded halls.

He’s teaching an introductory physics class in multiple sections, in one of the lecture halls like a theater, huge and anonymous. He has graders assigned to him, students he’s never met before. By Wednesday, he understands all of Dick’s complaints about the Blackboard system and adds his own.

He’s teaching a graduate cosmology course as well, with a more manageable number of students. He gives them real papers to read, classics in the field as well as more recent ones, and makes up his own problems to go along with them. Ron had grinned when Nix had mentioned the plan to him. “Good luck with that,” he said, leaving Nix disturbed.

By Wednesday, he understands, since the intimate discussion he’d planned about the importance of galaxy rotation curves ends up with Nix summarizing the paper on the fly, since no one had done the reading. He ends class early with a stern admonishment.

By Thursday, all hell has broken loose. Moose Heyliger gets hit by a car crossing a campus road, and until Friday no one knows if he’s going to make it or not. The driver, a freshman from Iowa, had only moved in two weeks before, and swears he simply hadn’t seen him. Heyliger receives a leave of absence for the duration of the semester.

Sink distributes the classes as evenly as he can, but Nix’s schedule suddenly sports an 8am lecture every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he tells Dick he’s thinking about jumping in front of traffic himself.

Dick, coming back from his own meeting with Sink that has his shoulders tight and straight, just shakes his head, and leaves Nix to his lesson plans.

Nix owes his collaborators updated runs of his data. Even already submitted, everyone has little tweaks to the programs they want to try, extra questions they want to pose, and he delays once, then twice, then realizes this is why nothing gets done during the semester.

He adopts Webster and Malarkey into his newly minted research group. He’d spent enough time with them when he was a post-doc that it seems natural, and they’re not total strangers to his research, so he gives them access to his code base and data files and sends them off with all the questions he hasn’t had time to investigate himself.

He spends his non-class time picking new, simpler papers for his graduate students, and revising his undergraduate seminars as well, as the students plow through the material in fits and starts that fail whatsoever to correspond to the lesson plans he’d laid out. At 2pm on Friday, they get the update that Moose is awake and out of danger, and Nix flees campus, feeling like it’s been weeks instead of days since the semester started.

* * *

 

They meet in Dick’s backyard to celebrate the end of the first week of classes. Florence and Ed come out as well. Ed leans heavily on a cane but refuses to sit, stomping heavily around the lawn and interrogating each of the men on their classes for the upcoming semester. Florence latches onto Harry early, and Nix overhears them chatting in remarkable depth about Harry’s extensive array of sisters. He catches Dick’s eye, both of them well-versed in Florence’s remarkable recall ability. Nix is pretty sure Florence could write a paper about Nix’s work herself at this point. Both Ed and Florence were professors themselves before they retired, even if it was in anthropology instead of physics.

It hadn’t occurred to Nix to even ask Allie to come along until he was already heading out the door. He hadn’t lingered on the idea at the time, but watching Harry, Nix wonders idly how it would have gone. 

Ron had been threatened with a search party if he didn’t start showing up to social events again. Nix, Dick, and even Harry, who barely knows Ron but has been filled in on the gossip, have all speculated about who has such a hold on him. Harry, with no direct information to hand, decides Ron is dating a spy, someone with a secret identity worth hiding. Dick, who is clearly concerned about Ron’s absence, declines to speculate at any great length. But once, while doing dishes at the observatory one night, he’d mused that he suspected it was someone they knew—else why keep it a secret at all?

Nix isn’t sure what to think. He thinks Ron might just be the kind of person who didn’t want speculation about his dating life at all, which was certainly what would happen if he brought someone around. He had to know that keeping secrets only made it more salacious, but Nix also knew Ron had no qualms with wild rumors. He just preferred them to have as little grounding in reality as possible.

When Ron does show up at the gate, the steady hand he holds to the small of Carwood Lipton’s back makes the relationship—and his reticence about revealing it—clear. Nix blinks. He wouldn’t have said there was much he’d put past Ron Speirs, but now that he’s faced with it, dating his graduate student does seem out of character. But if that’s true, then mild-manned Lipton shacking up with his professor seems even stranger. Ron is too sharp for he and Dick to do more than exchange the briefest of glances, but Dick just steps forward, holding out his hand.

“Carwood,” he greets. “Haven’t seen you in a few months. Enjoying life after grad school?”

Lipton smiles, sliding part of the expression back to Ron. “It’s been a change,” he admits. “But a good one.”

They chat easily about the job he took with an engineering firm in Evanston, and Nix watches Ron fix himself a drink with a focus that tells Nix he’s not as relaxed as he appears.

Nix leans his hip against the picnic table. “So.” He keeps his voice low.

Ron raises his eyebrows.

Nix crosses his arms. “Come on. You were his adviser. It’s very Classical, I’ll give you that, master and student. Or was it? Something tells me if it were so very platonic, you wouldn’t have been off the grid all summer.”

“I’m not denying anything.”

“No, you’ll let us fill in all the blanks. Should I? About just how he earned that doctorate?”

Ron stares him down, not a twitch. “You were on his committee. Did you see me go easy? Did a single sentence of his thesis sound unoriginal or poorly conceived?”

Ron had, in fact, kept grilling Lipton long after Nix and the others had talked themselves out during his defense. Nix had been ready to pass Lipton at his rehearsal defense two weeks before the real one. Nix had read the drafts of Lipton’s work, the long, slogging evolution of it, and is very sure that Lipton had spent long hours in Ron’s office going over it. Nix also knows that anything less would have been more cause for alarm.

Nix looks across at Lipton, smiling into the sun and letting Dick introduce him to Florence, Ed, and Harry. He looks relaxed, more so than he had the last few months of his thesis work. He looks happy.

“So is that the glow of true love, or a just life outside academia?” Nix asks, relenting. “Either way, pretty sure I never felt like that.”

Ron’s face softens, looking across the yard as well. “I know how it looks,” he allows. “But I also know what it _is_.” He shifts his gaze to Nix. “I’ve never understood yearning from afar. Or worrying about keeping up appearances.”

Nix snorts. “’Keeping up appearances’ is on the Nixon family crest.” Ron watches him, eyes serious, until Nix shrugs, breaking the moment with an overly cheery clink of his glass against Ron’s. “Well, mazel tov.”

Florence and Ed are delighted by Lipton for the same reasons they fawn over Dick. Nix sees Harry watching him and Ron. He’s heard enough from both of them that he must be able to draw his own conclusions, but he doesn’t say much. He takes Dick’s lead, chatting with Lipton about his new job.

After burgers and beers, apple pie and a thousand rounds of fetch with Abbie, the fireflies come out, and Florence and Ed trundle back inside. Ron and Lipton make their escape not long after, and Nix sits in the cooling September evening across from Harry and Dick. The food has mostly been packed away, and the table holds only a few scattered glasses, the lingering last piece of pie.

“He was engaged, you know,” Dick says, ignoring the way Nix is slipping Abbie a forgotten edge of a hamburger bun.

“Who?” Harry asks.

“Carwood.” Dick’s voice is neutral, and he breaks off a piece of the pie crust, setting it almost absently on his tongue. “Back when he first started. They dated all through high school and college. He told me about it, one of the department Christmas parties. Maybe three years ago, now?”

Harry looks uncomfortable, though it’s hard to tell in the blue twilight.

“Fuck,” Nix says succinctly.

Dick shrugs, though he doesn’t quite appear easy either. “They seem happy.”

* * *

 

A few weeks into the semester, Nix walks into a staff meeting ten minutes late. The seat next to Dick is still open by tradition, so he slides into it. Dick doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at him. Ten minutes is actually pretty good for Nix.

“Thanks for joining us, Nix,” Sink says, but Nix shrugs it off. If Sink expected his tardiness to improve with the faculty appointment, the excess of optimism was not Nix’s fault. “This is Buck Compton, our potential hire for Professor Heyliger’s position.” Nix blinks at the tall blond man who stands up — and up, and up, Christ, who needs to be that tall? — to reach out to shake Nix’s hand across the table.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, all charm and wide smile.

“Yeah,” Nix says, ducking his bright blue eyes. “Sure.”

Later he kicks his feet up on his desk while Dick battles the Blackboard system, a crease tugging his eyebrows together. “I don’t like the new guy. Who else is coming to visit?”

Dick raises an eyebrow at him. “You missed the other two visits.” Nix frowns, vaguely remembering some emails he’d neglected. “They already did their guest lectures. And they were pretty bad. Compton was great, all the students said so. They loved his teaching style.”

Nix waves a hand in the air. “So what? Kids don’t know what’s good for them. Heck, Dike gets a dozen great ratings every year just because half the time he forgets to assign homework sets. It doesn’t make him a good teacher.”

“Compton’s publication record is better than any of the other candidates. Three _Nature_ papers. He did his grad work at Caltech, and post-docs at Max Planck and Harvard. We’re not going to get anyone else on such short notice.”

“What kind of name is Buck anyway?” Nix asks, and his annoyance only grows when Dick smiles at his computer screen in a fond sort of way. Nix doesn’t think the blond hulk deserves any such reaction.

“You know you’re not on the hiring committee anyway. Your vote doesn’t count.”

“Well, it should.”

* * *

 

He sees Allie for the first time in weeks when he bumps into her, once again, in the grocery store. It’s awkward at first, but somehow he ends up taking advice from her in front of the seafood display, and then he’s following her back to her apartment. He cooks the tuna while she bosses him around the kitchen and drinks wine, and he remembers why he’d picked her up the first time.

He tells her about his students, about the endless drag of lesson plans and homework sets. She listens and nods in all the right places, but Nix can tell she’s bored, and to be honest, he’s bored and frustrated all over again telling her about it.

He leans over their empty plates instead, takes her wine glass, and sets it down on her very hipster, reclaimed wood coffee table. He pulls her to her feet and she turns without hesitation to lead him back to the bedroom.

The evening’s second half is a lot less boring. But after the clean-up and the requisite small talk, she kicks him out again. She works early mornings. Nix drives the quiet roads home with the radio turned down low. He supposes he could like this. It’s foolish to expect all the things you want in one place.

* * *

 

Nix gives his first exam at the end of the month. He works on it for a week beforehand, selecting problems he thinks showcase the key concepts, with small but clever variations on the homework they’ve been working on.

Every single student fails.

Nix regrades all the exams, baffled and disappointed, but even with partial credit, it’s a unified disaster. The students look resigned when he hands back the papers, and Nix realizes they’d been expecting the grades.

He walks out of class not sure which of them is more frustrated, him or his students.

Nix is still behind on research, has barely touched his work since the semester started. Still, the awkwardness between him and his students is growing palpable, and Nix decides to swing by journal club rather than hole up in his office when he finds himself with an hour to kill on a Wednesday afternoon. Maybe his graduate seminar hasn’t been the hit he’d expected, but surely he can still make a good impression there.

When he walks in, it’s not the handful of students and Peacock’s gentle but bumbling explanations that greet him, but a nearly full table and Compton’s broad grin. “I offered to take over,” Compton explains cheerfully. “Switch things up a little.”

Nix frowns at the article in front of him, which looks like a pretty dry engineering paper to him. “Yeah,” he says. “This looks way more fun than mathematical methods.”

Compton doesn’t know him or the club’s history enough to understand the dig, but he expects smiles from the students. Malarkey surprises him.

“I think it’s neat what they did,” he says, casting a somewhat sideways glance in Nix’s direction. “I didn’t know you could even make mirrors out of carbon nanotubes. That sounds like sci-fi. But they made it sound believable. I mean, _I_ believed them.”

“You mean as opposed to last week’s travesty?” Muck asks.

“I didn’t tell you they’d all be good papers,” Compton warns, but he has a satisfied look about him. “I want you to be able to tell the difference.”

“Yeah,” Malarkey says. “Well this one was.” He has a dreamy, excited look that Nix hasn’t really seen on his face since the semester started.

They all launch into more details about the experiment, which Nix admits sounds interesting on the surface, though the details bore him to tears. But it’s that intent, intense look on Malarkey’s face that bothers him. He remembers feeling that way about all of it himself, and seeing the look echoed in his students’ faces when he was just their unofficial mentor. It’s increasingly elusive lately though. Nix already feels up to his neck. He has no idea how to reclaim that look, for himself or his students.

* * *

 

When Nix pushes open their office door, he finds Dick staring at his computer screen, hands folded in his lap. He barely looks up when Nix enters, and Nix frowns. “You look like someone killed your dog,” he says.

Dick just sits up even more stiffly in his chair. He breathes in through his nose. “They’re selling the observatory.”

Nix stares at him for a moment. It takes a full few seconds for him to change gears, to understand what Dick is saying. The observatory, and Dick’s job, gone. Evaporated. “They can’t do that.”

Dick levels a glare at him. “Want to bet?”

“It’s an historic site.”

“Which is half the problem with it. It’s a nightmare to renovate. And the land around it isn’t protected, and it’s worth a truckload. They’re selling it to the highest bidder. It’s going to end up in the hands of a developer,” and now that Dick has started, he gains momentum, though his anger has never been the shouting type. “And they’re going to build summer homes right up to its doorstep and flood the place with lights and charge twenty dollars a head for some rich snobs to stare at the sky. And meanwhile this place can continue to narrow its focus until it’s doing jack for real education. Heck of a university, right?”

He shoves his chair back, trying to pace, and then realizes he’s hemmed in by the desk, the bookcase, and Nix, which together nearly fill the small space.

Nix raises his hands, trying to calm him, though he feels as unbalanced as if it were his own position suddenly annihilated. “Okay. When is this happening?”

“Next year. Before the start of the academic year. The university doesn’t have the funds or the interest to support it so they’re just tossing it.”

Nix drops his hands to Dick’s shoulders, not finding a better place for them. “What are you going to do?”

Dick twists away from him and keeps walking. “Start looking for a job.”

Nix’s heart is beating a panicked tattoo high up in his throat. He’s been dragging himself through, just barely. If Dick leaves… Nix swallows it down. He wants everything, of course. He wants his research, and he wants Dick, and he’s a spoiled jerk, and he’s going to get what he wants.

“No.”

Dick drops into his chair with a heavy thump, the chair creaking and cracking with it. “They made their decision,” he says.

“Then we find another way. We’ll find funding. There are grants out there for this stuff, right?”

“Not enough.” The answer sounds exhausted, like Dick’s been through all this already, and Nix remembers the applications he’d seen at Dick’s house, for money far beyond the cost of a few summer camps. Money to fund the operations of the observatory itself, fund Dick’s own salary. It’s a fortune compared to the few thousand dollars at a time Dick usually claws out of the National Science Foundation, NASA and NOAA and whoever else he can beg from. Nix knows Dick well enough to intuit suddenly that he wouldn’t be this tired without the fight already finished, that none of this is fresh information for Dick. He’s been stewing on it for a while.

“When did they tell you?” He asks, suddenly suspicious.

Dick rubs at his face. “They announced it yesterday in writing. But it’s been a done deal since April, I guess. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

April was six months ago. In April, Nix still married, for Christ’s sake. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Nix felt better when Dick was still spitting with anger. The bitter quiet he exudes, sitting back at his desk, only makes Nix feel less grounded.

“Come on, Nix,” Dick argues, and Nix swallows against a sick churning feeling. He had, of course, in so many words. Dick had been complaining all year about funding, about the university’s reticence on approving his programs. Nix had put it down to the grumbling of every academic about science funding and grant writing. But Nix knows Dick, and if Nix hadn’t had his head so far embedded in his own problems, he would have seen the obvious.

“So what,” he asks instead, changing tack. “You’re gonna take this without a fight?”

“I’ve been fighting all year,” Dick says, voice crackling again. “I’ve written grants everywhere I knew how, I’ve badgered the director here until he’ll barely talk to me.”

“You haven’t had me,” Nix insists, and Dick cuts his eyes sideways, already shaking his head. “Dick. Let me help. Come on, let’s make a plan.”

Dick sets his hands on his desk, studying them. “I need to go let Abbie out, and Harry’s coming over at six.”

“Well.” Nix puts his hands on his hips, then drops them again. “Tomorrow, then.”

Dick nods, and moves for his coat, sliding phone and keys into pockets. Nix stops him, grabbing his sleeve before he can leave. “Dick.” He waits, hoping Dick will look up, but Dick’s eyes stall at the hand on his arm. “Your fight is my fight,” Nix says anyway. Dick’s face contorts and smooths over again in an expression Nix can’t place before he extricates himself carefully from Nix’s grasp.

“Thanks,” he says. But he’s already out the door.

* * *

 

Nix is sitting at his kitchen table with a carton of sesame chicken. The paper in front of him has a series of half-finished exam problems, as he tries to figure out a middle ground between questions they’ll sail through and ones they’ll crucify him for. His mid-term evaluations had not gone well, and while Nix doesn’t care about the portions that will be replicated on RateMyProfessor, Sink’s frustration had been plain.

It was one thing to fail on his own terms, but Sink’s suggestion to observe Compton’s class had been the true insult. Nix shrugs away the memory. He taps at his computer screen. His tabs are an array of his old homework scans, a story about Chicago public schools Harry had sent him, a story about a skateboarding Corgi Harry had sent him, and a slew of grant opportunities focusing on education and outreach that Dick has probably applied for three times already.

His email refreshes. One new message. He clicks, grateful for the distraction.

Two minutes later he’s on the phone.

“You can’t be serious,” he snaps. “What the hell did you do?”

“Nix, I told you it was only preliminary,” Kellor says, level but with an edge to her voice. “I warned you.”

“Check it again,” he insists.

“We’ve checked it plenty of times. The science team tested it, we ran blind data through the system. This is it. I’m sorry.”

“This invalidates everything. Do you get that? If your maps are wrong, then my data are worthless.” Worse than worthless. Wrong. The paper is already published. He’ll have to retract it. Nix can only imagine what Sink’s response to _that_ is going to be.

“This is science,” Kellor tells him, not unkindly. “We find new things.”

“You couldn’t have found it six months ago?” Nix growls.

“You’re welcome for the heads up,” she says. “It’ll be online Monday.”

Nix sinks back into his chair, staring at the remains of his dinner.

Fuck.

* * *

 

The Tap is crowded on Friday nights, but Nix knows the corner they usually end up in. He pushes his way through the throngs of people until he spots Dick’s gleaming hair, sticking out over the top of a booth in the back. Harry is crowded in next to him, Lipton and Ron across, so Nix slides in against Harry’s side.

He’s tired, and he’s not sure why he came out, other than it seemed more socially acceptable to drink in a bar with friends than alone in his house, and there wasn’t really a third option after today’s news. The others order food. Nix isn’t hungry, but he gets a burger anyway just to pick at it, and to avoid Dick’s inevitable worry if he doesn’t eat. But Dick is hidden behind Harry’s eager lean over the table, and for once, Nix finds his cheer grating, especially when he does catch the little smiles he sees Harry winning from Dick.  

Everyone else is in good spirits, cheerful and loud, and Nix sits on his news, stewing. He orders another drink.

Ron is one of those people who orders salads and then steals everyone else’s sides. Dick is guarding his onion rings with a practiced air, but Nix rotates his plate to make the theft easier.

He’s nursing his fourth drink when Harry looks over Nix’s shoulder in confusion. “Hello?” he asks.

Nix cranes his head and finds Compton looming over him, smiling his obnoxious broad smile. “Hi guys. I thought I saw you over here. Mind if I pull up a chair?”

Nix does mind, but there’s no way to say that, and the others make indistinct noises of agreement. He pulls up a chair to the table’s end, backwards, and sits down, dangling his arms over the back. His knee knocks against Nix’s. 

“I’m glad I ran into you all,” he says after he’s shaken Harry’s hand and they’ve traded small talk about the week. Nix stays stubbornly silent. “I had a question about advising, if you don’t mind a bit of shop talk.”

“What have you got?” Dick asks obligingly, and Nix rolls his eyes.

“I was talking to Don Malarkey,” Compton starts, and Nix raises his head from where he’s been glaring into his glass. Compton angles his body toward Nix a bit. “He’s interested in getting into more instrumentation, wants to start putting some hours into the shop. I don’t have any students yet, but I want to help the kid out.”

“Malarkey’s got a lab,” Nix says, and ignores the way the table either turns to him or takes great care not to. He reserves his glare for Compton.

“Sure he does,” Compton says easily, but Nix can see the smirk lurking on his face. “I just want him to be in the group that’s the best fit for him. If he’s thinking about switching, I just think we should talk, adviser to adviser, and figure out the right move. I’m asking for advice here, Nix.”

Nix ignores the appeal. Big money, Caltech fuckoff coming in and acting like Nix’s students need saving. “He wanted to study the Big Bang,” Nix says, and it might be a little loud, but it’s a loud bar. “You’re dicking around with lasers and vacuum chambers.” Another night it would have come off as standard ribbing between observing and instrumentation, but Nix can hear he’s not quite hitting the tone.

Dick eyes him warily. “Maybe we should talk about this in the office on Monday,” he warns, but Nix doesn’t want to play nice.

“Shut up, Dick. He’s poaching my student.”

Compton frowns. “I think he just wants to get his hands dirty, that’s all. He’s in my hardware class, we’ve got a rapport —”

Nix stands, pushing his way out of the booth violently, and Compton stands as well, pushing his chair back to make room. “Fuck your rapport.”

Compton holds his hands up defensively. “Hey. Calm down, Nix.”

Nix decks him. He finds it more than a little gratifying that Compton actually bothers to hit him back, even if it does knock Nix back into the next table and send him nearly to the ground. Still, he’s back up and heading toward Compton again, barely feeling the punch.

Someone grabs him by the arm, jerking him back and putting him into a hold, and Nix lashes out without looking, his elbow connecting with something solid before he registers Dick’s voice in his ear. “Stop it, Nix, what’s gotten into you?”

He struggles for another minute, his blood surging, but he always forgets that Dick had been a wrestling champ once upon a time. Despite the twenty pounds Nix has on him, Dick plants his feet and holds his arms, and Nix finally goes limp in surrender. Ron has Compton by the shoulder, and he’s wiping at his split lip and staring at the blood in bewilderment, looking up to trade a confused, startled look with Nix.

Dick hurries Nix outside before he can start the fight anew or get them yelled at by the management. “What in heaven’s name, Nix?” he asks, dragging him down the block a few feet and settling him down at a bus stop.

“He’s an asshole,” Nix bites out. His left eye is squeezed shut and finally starting to sting, and he reaches up, feeling at it. Dick shoves his hands away and lifts Nix’s hair himself, peering at his eye worriedly.

“So you had to punch him in the head?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Nix groans, closing his good eye as well. Dick shines something bright at his eyes, probably the flashlight from his phone, and Nix flinches back.

“It’s not so bad,” Dick declares. “You’re gonna have a shiner, though.” Nix almost snaps at him again, but then Dick’s hands are cupping his face, fingers brushing the skin around his eye, still darkening with a bruise. Dick’s hands are cold in the late autumn air, and it feels strangely wonderful against his aching face. Nix shivers suddenly, not daring to open his eyes.

“Hey,” Ron’s voice breaks in, and Dick stands up straight, his hands dropping away. Nix drops his head into his own hands, flinching again when he touches his own face too roughly. “I brought your phone. I can give Harry a lift home later. You probably should get out of here. The bartender isn’t going to let you back in.”

“Thanks,” Dick says, taking his things. “How’s Buck?”

“He’s fine.”

Nix feels two sets of eyes on him, and his skin crawls under their scrutiny, tasting something awful in the back of his throat, blood or despair or possibly shame, though he thought he’d shed that particular emotion a decade and more ago. “My paper’s getting retracted,” he admits to the sidewalk.

There’s no response, but Nix can imagine the look they’re exchanging, two men who aren’t given to outpourings of sympathy, and he wonders, with a hysterical sort of amusement, if they would rock-paper-scissors for the chance to pat him on the shoulder and find an awkward platitude.

“Carol Kellor’s team redid their dust maps, and it turns out, our galaxy is really dusty,” Nix continues, mock surprise dripping from his voice. “Which was the whole point of their survey, mind you, and you’d think three years of data would be enough to get a pretty good picture. But it turns out, it’s not, and their final maps render absolutely all of my data worthless.

“So. Retraction. Plus, you know, the last two and a half years of my life down the drain, research-wise, but who’s counting?”

Dick lowers himself onto the bench next to Nix. “I’m sorry, Lew,” he says. “Sometimes, research reveals new things. Scientific results change.”

“Of course they do,” Nix says bitterly. “And if my paper had stood for a few decades instead of six months, I might be remembered as something other than that guy who published a shitty, overhyped result. You think Sink’s gonna be so pleased this time around when he’s giving statements to the press on the university’s behalf?” 

Eventually Nix decides it’s safe to raise his head again, if only because keeping it down like that is causing the blood to pound uncomfortably in his bad eye. He tips his head back, staring at the tops of the buildings around them, the fog blurring the tops of the tallest ones.

“Come on,” Dick says eventually. “Let me drive you home.” Ron does grip his shoulder in a silent apology before letting them go, and Nix lets Dick pull him to his feet, walk him down the block to Dick’s Corolla, and pour him into the passenger seat.

“I was going to tell you,” Dick says, a little too heartily, obviously changing the conversation. “I talked to Sink this morning.”

Nix snorts. “How was his mood? You think he’ll take the news well?”

“He’s worried about your graduate class. Looks like midterms were a little rough.” He says it bracingly. Maybe he thinks it doesn’t sound like such a condemnation that way, like Nix won’t remember everything else that makes it the omen that it is.

“Sure,” Nix says dully. “Midterms and the rest of it.”

“First year of teaching can be a rough transition. He asked if I could observe some of your classes. Do you think that would help?” He glances away from the road when Nix doesn’t respond. “Lew?”

They’re almost back to Nix’s apartment before he breaks the silence. “I have wasted the last decade of my life.” He keeps staring out the window at the darkness, feeling Dick’s steady gaze on him.

“You haven’t,” Dick tells him. “You’re just course correcting. It takes time, and it might not happen all at once, but you’re doing it. You’ve still got your job.” He raises an eyebrow. “Unlike me, for instance.”

“The wife and dog though,” Nix laughs, and he knows his smile in the mirror would be an ugly thing. “They’re gone for good.”

Dick hesitates. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

Nix laughs, louder this time. “A good thing? Jesus, Dick.”

“I mean it,” Dick says seriously, pulling into Nix’s parking lot. He puts the car in park and unbuckles his seatbelt, turning to Nix. “Listen. I didn’t say anything because I’m not a totally objective observer, but Kathy and you,” he stops himself. “I don’t know the ins and outs of your marriage. But it always appeared that there was very little love lost between you. Ten years is a long time, so I know you must have cared for each other, but Nix, you can do better. You deserve so much more than that. The divorce was a good thing.”

“I thought you were a church goer,” Nix says dully.

“Yeah,” Dick says, touching his shoulder and shaking him a little. “I am. And so it worried me to see you married to someone who didn’t seem to care for you. And, honestly, Nix, someone who you didn’t seem to care for either.”

“That’s some great Monday morning quarterbacking,” Nix says, his hackles rising.

Dick’s mouth twists. “It’s not really a new observation.”

“Oh, so now I get, ‘I told you so,’ too? You’re really racking ‘em up there.”

Dick sighs and hits the trifecta by replying, “You’re drunk.” It has the virtue of being true, but he also knows full well that it’s a surefire way to piss Nix off even further. Nix slams the car door without saying good night.

* * *

 

Ron shows up at his door unannounced the next afternoon, and Nix gives him a sour look from the doorway, blocking the opening.

“You don’t have so many friends you can afford to keep treating them like this,” Ron points out. He’s not even teasing, is the worst part, and Nix knows it. It doesn’t mean he’s chastened. Hell, he’s still angry. Maybe not at Compton, but he was never really angry at Compton. Compton was just a smug and convenient receptacle for his anger. He’d found it in him to be mad at Dick last night, and Nix sometimes thinks he’s the only person in the world dumb enough to get mad at Dick Winters. Nix has plenty of anger left over for Ron, too. Luckily for himself, Nix’s anger is usually a quiet, bitter creature, because he doesn’t have the energy for shouting this morning.

“If you’re here to lecture me, let’s pretend you did it already, and you can get the fuck back out.”

Ron just fixes him with a steady look that says clearly that he has better ways of getting his point across than lectures, and maneuvers his way into the room. Nix doesn’t stop him. He didn’t have to open the door at all. He’s still spoiling for a fight, and he turns to follow Ron into the living room. Ron stops before going past and grasps Nix’s chin, turning his face for inspection and letting the bright afternoon light in, watching his eye.

Nix tries to jerk away, but Ron’s hands are tight and the sunlight streaming in is painful, and he only winces. Ron releases him, satisfied. Nix’s anger bubbles up from a simmer to a low boil.

“I bear news you should be interested in,” Ron says, taking a seat in the armchair and settling in.

“Really.”

“Compton’s not going to mention last night to the university.”

Nix should probably care more. He’s as probationary as they come in his first year, his students are failing, and his publication record has just taken a big hit. The university won’t be looking at many reasons to keep him.

“Great,” he grunts.

“You want to go out in a blaze of glory, you could try arson next,” Ron suggests. “You can punch as many people as you like, but it won’t bring up your students’ grades or fix your research.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nix points out. “They’ll be just as happy to fire me for anything else.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it,” Ron says quietly. “You’re acting like all of this is out of your control. Are you going to put some effort into any of this, or just curl up into a bottle and eventually roll home to the family name?”

“Fuck you.”

Ron doesn’t bat an eye. His uncanny detachment when he wants is usually something Nix admires, but now he wishes Ron would react. “You’re a gifted researcher,” Ron says. “That’s not a compliment, it’s a fact. It means you barely worked to get where you are. Then you got dealt a bad hand with that preliminary data, and, while you may not like hearing it, you chose to play it.” Nix glares, but Ron’s right, and that’s what stings. “But it’s recoverable, if you deal yourself back in instead of sulking about it.”

Ron continues, relentless. “You’re not a gifted teacher. Most of us aren’t. You can wallow in self-pity about it, or you can put in the effort and get better.”

Nix’s chest feels tight already, but Ron isn’t done, and Nix already knows what’s next. “Dick might leave Chicago,” he says, and Nix feels lightheaded with the pressure, like a soda bottle someone shook too long. “You can let him go, or you can finally say something and make a choice. He might leave anyway, but all he’s got here now is a job, and a friend who acts like he’s already written himself out. You should at least make him an offer.”

And there it is. All of Nix’s anger fizzles out in a wave of what he suspects is simple panic. “Jesus Christ,” Nix mutters, dropping his head into his hands. Like hell Ron doesn’t do lectures.

But it seems the lesson is at an end, and Ron is silent while Nix listens to his words reverberate around his mind. It all has the uncomfortable ring of truth. After a while, Ron rises, apparently ready to let Nix ponder longer on his own.

His hand is on the door before Nix asks. “Why isn’t Compton reporting anything?”

Ron looks back at him with a smile, amused. “Apparently your students, showing questionable taste, have been sticking up for you. They’ve been telling him you’re having a rough time, and he’s sympathetic. I think he might actually be a nice guy.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Not everything’s as bad as you think.”

* * *

 

Nix brings doughnuts to Dick’s place on Sunday.

“I’ve been an asshole,” he says, and Dick quirks an eyebrow at him.

“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” Dick says, which isn’t disagreement, but he lets him in and grabs napkins for the doughnuts. Abbie tracks the pink cardboard box with keen interest until they settle and she realizes that the food isn’t for sharing. She rests her head on Nix’s knee with feigned disinterest. He’s always been a softer touch than Dick when it comes to the dog.

“I think you should sit in on some of my classes,” Nix says. “If you don’t mind. I could use some tips.”

“Of course.”

Nix studies him. It seems too easy, but hasn’t it always been? That’s Dick, too helpful for his own good, and unreasonably so when it comes to Nix’s demands. He sits, waiting for Nix’s response, and then selects a doughnut with chocolate glaze and sprinkles, catching sprinkles in his free hand and swiping them up with his tongue.

“I’m glad to help,” Dick says quietly, still juggling sprinkles. “I meant what I said about course-correcting. I know it’s not easy, but I’m proud of you for trying.”

Ron’s other suggestions are still churning in Nix’s mind. He opens his mouth. He might ask for a doughnut. He might ask for something else entirely.

The door opens with a scrape and the jingle of keys, and Harry walks in. “Hey. Ooh, doughnuts!”

Nix reaches for a chocolate doughnut with a sigh.

* * *

 

Dick may be proud, but that doesn’t mean he makes it easy on Nix. He finds time over the next few weeks to sit in on each of Nix’s classes once. Then he gives him a set of corrections that take longer than the lecture itself.

Nix really is grateful, but he can’t say he doesn’t interrupt with the occasional sarcastic aside. Dick takes them in stride. He knew what he was agreeing to, and Nix does follow his suggestions.

No one’s been using his office hours, but Nix doubles them anyway on Dick’s recommendation, and he starts advertising them regularly in class. He cuts out half of the derivations and theory from his lesson plans and spends the additional class time doing example problems.

He picks shorter papers for his graduate seminar, and offers a rubric for discussion.

No magical changes occur, but the students’ looks of exhausted relief tell him that any change is a welcome acknowledgement of the mitigated disaster of the semester so far. He takes to spending his downtime in the small computer lab with Webster and Malarkey. He gets even less work done than usual, but it’s the first place he starts seeing results. In one afternoon, he fixes a coding error that had apparently been plaguing Webster since two weeks into the semester.

His office hours drag out later and later. He misses two messages from Allie, then three, before they stop coming entirely. He doesn’t have the time to miss her.

Sink gives him the chewing out Nix had been expecting for the paper retraction. He makes all the points about carelessness and the reputation of the department that Nix had expected, and they’re almost less terrifying in person than Nix had expected. At least when he walks out, it’s over. Nix makes his way through the same litany of reporters he had the first time, this time to explain in excruciating apologies how such a thing comes to occur. It’s embarrassing and self-effacing, but he finds that he barely has time to reflect on the interviews before his classes take over again.

* * *

 

The week before Thanksgiving, Nix is working late in his office. His stomach rumbles at him just before midnight, so he trudges down the hall to the kitchenette, digging for the remains of some Thai food he’d stowed there a few nights ago. It isn’t there, of course, because the department has a thieving problem, and because he shouldn’t expect things to go right after working this late. He’s still staring into the fridge lights, willing his dinner to reappear, when Perconte rounds the corner looking half like a zombie. He starts when he sees Nix standing in the middle of the room.

“Hey, Frank,” Nix says glumly. “You know anything about the fridge thief?”

“Hey, Professor,” he replies, coming forward again, rubbing at his eyes. “No. I thought that thing was a biohazard anyway.” And Nix sighs, because that’s true, too. “Working late?”

“Could say the same,” Nix responds, finally shutting the fridge in defeat. There’s a burst of noise from down the hall, mingled shouts and jeers. “You got the whole gang in there?”

“Yeah, well.” Perconte rubs the back of his head, the familiar guilty look of a student with an unfinished problem set due the next day. “We got kind of stuck, to be honest. It ain’t going so hot.” Nix hesitates, torn between hiding in his office and being a good teacher. Perco looks like he knows it’s a bribe, but he offers hopefully, “We got pizza?”

And so Nix finds himself in one of the abandoned meeting rooms that serve so often as after-hours study centers, his entrance hailed by tired cheers from some of the guys. Nix inhales three slices of lukewarm pepperoni pizza while Perconte and Garcia try to explain the scrawl of equations and diagrams covering the whiteboard. Nix squints, trying to remember what he’d had in mind when he’d designed the homework set. It really shouldn’t have been this difficult.

“Okay,” he finally cuts them off. “I don’t know what’s going on over here.” He waves at the right side of the board where things had started going off the rails, invoking some math that doesn’t jive with any physical laws he’s aware of, and possibly isn’t even math. He suspects the stuff in the far corner is Webster’s idea of a joke, but Greek isn’t his forte. “Let’s take it back to the beginning.”

The room stares at the board in defeated silence and finally Liebgott rises, taking the eraser and destroying in a few seconds what must have been an hour’s worth of work. Nix steps around him, uncapping a marker and boxing the equation tucked into the left middle of the board. “Start here,” he orders. “This much is good. Then what?”

“Apply the tensor,” Liebgott says, monotone and exhausted, and when Nix holds out the marker, he attacks the board like it’s done him some great wrong, jabbing at it with an angry, barely legible flow of numbers and symbols.

“You dropped a term,” Webster says after a minute, just as Nix is opening is mouth to point out the same, and Liebgott whirls, pointing the marker like it’s a switchblade.

“You wanna do this?”

“I’m just pointing out —” Webster protests, wide-eyed, and Nix rolls his eyes and puts a warning hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“Easy, guys. David, he’s got it. Joe,” he taps the board one line up from where Joe’s working, the term that he hadn’t carried down.

“Yeah, yeah,” Liebgott mutters, and goes back to work.

Webster picks up the marker from him at the next stage with an apologetic clap on the shoulder, and while he works through the math, Nix sets up the next problem with Garcia and Perconte.

By the time they sketch out the last problem and he leaves them to clean up their work (he hopes, for his graders’ sakes) the next morning, it’s pushing 2 a.m. The city streets are quiet on his drive home, the lake a dark expanse to his right. He falls asleep still factoring cross products of the next night’s homework in his head.

* * *

 

Nix is cautiously optimistic about class when he arrives on campus the next day, eager to see the submitted assignments. He suspects, but can’t quite dare to hope, that he might be starting to see returns on all his efforts. But when he enters his office, Nix finds Dick uncharacteristically still, staring at the odd but largely unchanging assortment of posters and comics previous generations of academics have printed and taped to the office walls over the years. He glances up when Nix enters, and then resumes his study of the wall. When Nix circles around to his own desk, he sees that Dick’s computer isn’t even on.

“What’s wrong?”

Dick doesn’t respond for so long that Nix wonders if he’d actually asked the question out loud. Then he takes a quiet breath. “Harry and I broke up.”

“What the fuck?” Nix asks, his voice overloud. He finds himself scanning frantically back over their last few hangouts, wondering if he’d missed something. He thinks of Dick leaving the bar after Nix’s fight, driving him home and leaving Harry alone, and feels a twinge of guilt.

“I don’t.” Dick stops, the slight head tilt he does when he’s collecting himself. “I’d rather not talk about it here.”

Nix walks back around to perch on the corner of Dick’s desk. “Well, shit. You want to talk about it somewhere else?”

Dick glances up at him, then jogs his mouse to wake his computer. “Don’t you have class?”

Nix scowls. It’s why he had just arrived, actually. “Yeah. They can take an afternoon off.”

“Nix.”

“Alright, alright. Tell me I can finally buy you a drink after though.”

Dick shakes his head. He doesn’t smile, but the set of his jaw eases slightly, and Nix presses his advantage. “Pint of Ben and Jerry’s?”

“Go teach your class.”

Nix does, because Dick has lost the frankly terrifyingly blank look he’d been wearing, and if he still looks morose, at least he’s poking at his computer instead of staring emptily into space. He worries a little all through his class that Dick will have disappeared by the time Nix gets out, but he’s waiting when Nix pokes his head back through the office door, and he lets Nix ply him with milk and ice cream.

Nix can’t quite manage happiness, not with Dick drooping like a plant gone too long without watering. He feels pretty wretched, in fact, as if by wanting this for so long he has somehow brought it about. He doesn’t want to be responsible for the sag in Dick’s shoulders, the lack of conversation as he sucks at his milkshake. But it feels just a little like the first day of spring.

* * *

 

Harry texts him three days later. _Buy you a drink?_

Nix is torn between a loyal sense of anger and a rush of relief when he thinks about Harry, but in the end, it’s curiosity that wins out, and he finds himself sliding into a booth at their usual haunt. Harry’s even ordered him a whiskey instead of their usual beer, which means he’s feeling especially guilty.

Harry is wearing his most sheepish look. “How’s he doing?”

“Come on, Harry, what is this?” Nix snaps, because if Harry tells him he made a mistake and is looking for an opening, Nix is going to throw the drink in his goddamn face. 

“Don’t be sore,” he says, cringing a little. “I’m sorry, ok? I wasn’t trying to hurt him. You gotta know that.”

“Well, the road to hell and all,” Nix says, still hard.  Harry does look sorry, but it doesn’t make Nix feel any better.

“Look, I loved him, and I still love him. You know as well as me what kind of a guy he is. Christ, I dare you to spend time with him and not love him. But it wasn’t working, and it was time to call it off.”

Nix is still sitting stiffly against the booth, his whiskey untouched in front of him. “Just like that,” he says. He doesn’t even know why he’s doing it. He sure as hell doesn’t want to chase Harry back to Dick, but Nix has called up a girl’s best friend after breakups, and it’s never led anywhere good.

Harry scrubs a hand through his hair. It’s mussed, as if it’s not the first time he’s done it. “Look,” he says again, and stops, taking a long drink off his beer. “No, okay, look,” he tries again. “I got a few things to say, so let me finish, and if you don’t want to talk to me then, I’ll clear out for good.”

Nix settles into a more maintainable glare, and Harry blows out a breath.

“Like I said: I loved him. Things were going good. Really good. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder for anyone. I liked spending time with him. I was thinking about asking when his lease was up with those old folks.” Harry licks his lips, nervous. “And then I met someone.

“I swear nothing happened,” he adds hurriedly. “Not a thing. I wouldn’t. But just talking to her, it made me realize… what I had with Dick was great. But it wasn’t as good as it could be. Jesus, I sound like a prick,” he moans, and drops his face into his hands.

Nix stares at him in surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. “You’re leaving him for a woman?”

“Oh, come on,” Harry says tiredly, though he doesn’t pick up his head. “Anything but that angle, for Christ’s sake.”

“No,” Nix says, stung on Dick’s behalf. “You can wax on about how great he is, but then you go hightailing it for greener pastures? What are you trying to say?”

“I fell in love, Nix,” he says, peering at him through the hands still covering his face. “I’m saying I fell in love with somebody else, just talking with them, and it wasn’t Dick’s fault, and I feel like shit about it, but what else was I supposed to do?”

“So what, you want my blessing now? Congratulations for not screwing her right away? Fuck you, Harry.”

“Hey,” Harry says, voice sharp for the first time since Nix sat down. “I’m being honest, and I know I didn’t break his heart over it either, so maybe let me finish like we agreed.”

“I didn’t agree to anything,” Nix says mulishly, but he pulls his whiskey close and finally takes a swallow.

“I didn’t break his heart either,” Harry repeats. “And even if I had, he’s a big boy, and he’d get over it. Least I caught my fuckup before I married him, right?” He grins, the same shit-eating grin he’d had the first night Nix had ever met him, and Nix lets out a loud bark of laughter before he can remember he should be offended.

“My point,” Harry says, looking relieved, “is that it’s okay to kill something good to grab a chance at something great. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with me and Kitty. Maybe I’ll fuck it all up. But I couldn’t not try.” He leans back. “You should think about that, Nix.”

Nix raises his eyebrows. “Think about you and your girlfriend?”

“About going for it. I wasn’t going to shoot myself in the foot when I still had skin in the game, but I’m not the only one here who loves him.”

“Shut up,” Nix says immediately, any humor he’d gained evaporating. Harry, surprisingly, doesn’t flinch.

“You could be happy,” Harry says. “We had a good run, but I’ve seen the way he looks at you, too. I asked him, you know, after that first night when you ran off. Wasn’t sure what I was getting in the middle of. But he called you his straight best friend.” Harry, who smiles even when he’s complaining, is frowning at him, a worried crease between his eyebrows. “I want you to have that.”

Nix scowls into his glass. “You’re a goddamn sap. Did Dick ever tell you that?”

Harry’s face relaxes into its customary grin. “Drove him fucking nuts. He can’t handle it.”

Nix finishes off his drink. “And—what was her name? Kitty?”

Harry’s smile broadens. “Her favorite movie’s The Notebook.”

“A match made in heaven,” Nix says sourly. When Harry’s face only grows more saccharine, Nix shoves his empty glass across the table. “I’m not toasting you. You still dumped my best friend. Next round’s on you, too.”

* * *

 

At the beginning of December, Nix looks at the lesson plans he needs to write for the spring semester and nearly panics. He meant to go back to the South Pole for his January break, even though it’ll be a short trip, since this time his schedule is dictated by the resumption of classes. Especially since the retraction, he should try for more upgrades, get the telescope ready for another run. He could—and perhaps, for the sake of their experience, should—send his students, but they’ve been working almost exclusively on software.

He takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and knocks on Compton’s door.

“You got a minute?”

The two of them have barely spoken since the night at the bar. Nix had told Malarkey that if he wanted to switch advisers, Nix was fine with it. That was a lie, but one Nix knew was better than the truth. Malarkey hadn’t gotten around to formally filing yet, but his attendance in Nix’s lab had dropped noticeably.  It’s too small a department for Nix not to know that time has been spent in Compton’s optics lab.

Now, Nix explains what he has in mind. Malarkey and Webster should both go to Antarctica. Nix will pay for it out of his grant and together, they can handle the hardware and software upgrades Nix has in mind. His collaborators on site can help them through what they don’t know.

Buck assents—happily, even, Nix thinks. Hired on short notice, he’s been setting Malarkey to work on odd projects until he gets a full lab up and running for himself. It’s left Malarkey tinkering instead of with any serious work to focus on.

David’s mouth drops open when they tell the students the news. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack,” Nix assures him. Next to him, Malarkey looks between Nix and Buck for confirmation. “You two in?”

Luckily, they both have up to date passports, so Nix only has to overnight six different packages of paperwork to the NSF, instead of twelve, to clear the two of them for the Antarctic trip.

Webster hovers in Nix’s office when he hands him the approval paperwork, his travel schedule and orientation packet. He stares at them, wide-eyed. “It doesn’t feel like a lot of time to get anything done.”

Nix leans back against his desk, thinking of his frantic writing over the past year. “It never does,” he admits. When Webster still looks dubious, he adds, “Look, I spent two years doing nothing but that, and I still didn’t find anything. If we always found what we were looking for, it wouldn’t be research,” he concludes with a confidence he doesn’t feel. No need to poison the well of young optimism just because Nix is still bitter. Webster looks cheered anyway, and Dick, who’d been hiding behind his computer monitor for the whole exchange, raises an eyebrow at him in an oddly impressed sort of way.

* * *

 

Nix spends two weeks writing his final exam, mostly at home. His office hours are packed with students, and he ends up holding informal extra sessions three evenings a week. When he hands out the test, he can see the same grim and vaguely panicked “come what may” look in his students’ eyes that he feels.

He collects the exams and immediately heads home to pack, throwing clothes and his shaving kit into his luggage harder than he needs to. The downside to skipping Antarctica is that his parents have demanded his return home. He books a four-day visit, from the day before Christmas Eve until the 26th. He hasn’t been home since the divorce, and he can tell his parents have planned an earful, but there’s no escaping it.

Before he left campus, Dick had reminded him he could always spend the holiday in Pennsylvania instead. Dick’s family had met Nix exactly once, on a trip to Chicago Nix’s first year in the city that included not only Dick’s parents and sister, but his beloved Aunt Lottie as well. Nix has received Christmas and birthday cards from all of them ever since. But Nix only laughed in his face at the invitation. Something things you can’t avoid forever.

He grades while he’s waiting for his plane to take off, and the first exam, from Garcia, is nearly flawless. He frowns, wondering if he’s overcompensated for his earlier challenges. The second—Perconte’s—has a few errors, nothing serious. Luz had missed one of them entirely but muddled through the rest clearly enough. Nix is shocked, when he inputs the grades into a spreadsheet on the plane, to find he’s attained a nearly perfect bell curve without having to adjust the grades.

His good mood evaporates on arrival. The divorce, which had finally started to recede in Nix’s mind, is all his parents want to talk about. His father had received emails about Nix’s retraction, and while it’s far outside his wheelhouse, he knows a bad thing to needle his son about when he hears it. Nix finds his shoulders tightening with every passing hour and cutting remark.

Nix claims fatigue on the first night, but Christmas Eve is a marathon of extended family and, worse, board members and VPs from the nitration works, all of whom are apparently up to date on Nix’s year of failures. The last straw is on Christmas day, when his mother tells him she’s going out—to Kathy’s, because it wouldn’t be Christmas without seeing her “other daughter” as well.

Nix slams through the door, banging out onto the porch and heading out into the cold night. He makes it as far as the edge of the driveway before he realizes the yard won’t be nearly far enough, and he whirls back for the cars. His own is sitting snugly at home in Chicago, of course, but he grabs the keys to the spare car, the Mustang that he had driven nearly into the ground in high school and which had been lovingly repaired in the time since. He whips out of the driveway in a spray of gravel, radio blaring, and takes off, headlights lighting up the dark road in front of him.

He’s fifty miles down the road before he realizes he’s heading south, and then he just turns the radio up louder, refusing to think about it until he’s forced to slow, seeing the signs for Lancaster, next three exits. He almost keeps going, embarrassed, but then he cuts across two empty lanes and rolls into town. He stops for gas, but two different stations are not only closed but have shut their pumps off for the night, which Nix hadn’t even known was still a thing. He pulls out his phone, checking directions, and it’s not even ten minutes later that he’s cruising down a residential street, the houses small but well kept, and he pulls up in front of Dick family’s house. He sits at the curb for another ten minutes and then finally steels himself, making his way up the walk and knocking. It’s late, but there are lights still on, and he can hear the chatter of voices, bursting in laughter.

Ann answers the door, eyes narrowed in suspicion as she cracks it open, then relaxing into a puzzled but warm smile. “Hi, Lew,” she greets him. “I didn’t know you were coming by.” She pulls the door open wider in invitation, stepping back, and Nix can only stare at her for a minute, a little flummoxed in the face of her welcome. It doesn’t escape his notice that she, like the rest of her family, has picked up Dick’s nickname for him.

“Sorry for barging in,” he murmurs, stepping inside.

“It’s Christmas,” she dismisses him. “The more, the merrier. Give me your coat,” she orders, and then calls down the hall, “Dick! Lew’s here.”

Dick appears in the hallway a moment later, his sister’s surprised smile copied on his face. His mother’s voice drifts after him down the hallway. “Does he want pie? We still have a whole pie,” and his Aunt Lottie adding, “Finally! We need some men to balance out this henfest.”

Dick rolls his eyes, reaching out and wrapping his arms around Nix in an easy hug. “Merry Christmas! What are you doing here?” Dick’s face is warm next to his own, and he smells like Christmas, all pine needles and cinnamon and cloves. He’s not usually a hugger, but he should be: he steps in close and sure, arms strong and hands pressing firm on Nix’s shoulders. Nix grabs him back tightly, throat working to find the words, and Dick steps back, frowning at him. “Hey, Ann,” he says lightly. “Tell everybody we’ll be in in a minute.” He takes Nix’s coat, guiding him upstairs with a hand to his back. They walk down the hall to Dick’s parents’ room, where a pile of other coats covers the bed, a sea of quilted material and fake fur and knit scarves trailing out of sleeves. He tosses Nix’s on the pile, then takes him by the arms. “You alright?”

Nix shakes his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I had to get out of there, and I thought.” He stops, and Dick claps him on the shoulder, then squeezes him.

“You thought right. You want to talk? We can hole up in my room.” But Nix shakes his head, the vice-like pressure already lifting.

“Nah. Your family will just end up on the other side of the door anyway.” He takes a breath. “I just needed a minute. Let’s go.”

Dick shoves him toward the couch, and Nix takes his place next to Lottie, who asks him about the South Pole Telescope, which she thinks is the most amazing thing on Earth, and Dick’s mom gives him two slices of pie and a cup of coffee. It’s late by the time the conversation finally starts to wind down, and finally Dick’s parents and Lottie stand and stretch and then talk for another half hour in the hallway until Lottie bundles up to walk next door to her house, and Dick’s parents retreat to their bedroom.

Ann glances between the two of them and then yawns and heads for her own room, but not before making a series of faces at Dick she must think is behind Nix’s back, except that he’s watching her the whole time in the reflected light of the mirror over the mantle. Her expressions are the same as Dick’s, just smaller on her more petite features. He smiles into his coffee cup.

Dick reaches out to poke at the fireplace some more. Short one seat, Dick had opted for the floor, though Nix suspects it was less out of chivalry and more because he liked to take control of the poker and the fireplace. Nix slides off the couch and crawls over to shove his own hands at the fire, now burned down to a low, licking flame over the glowing embers. “Nice night,” Nix murmurs, and bumps Dick’s shoulder. “Thanks.”

He looks up to find Dick staring at him, a searching look, but he looks back at the fire. “Lew, you’re always welcome here. Or anywhere I go. You know that.”

Nix doesn’t reply. He’s oddly at peace. He’ll have to go home at some point, of course, if only to pick up his bag, and his ticket home is out of Newark. But Dick’s mother had already made a soft pile of pillows and blankets, stacked neatly at one end of the couch, with a towel and washcloth to match. He watches the fire burn down slowly. Out of the corner of his eye, Dick shifts and traces his fingers over a pattern in the rug. He seems to be on the verge of saying something. Nix waits, but eventually Dick just stands, and presses his hand to Nix’s shoulder.

“Night. And Merry Christmas.”

* * *

 

“You got plans this weekend?” Nix asks idly, the week after New Years. He’s bored, tired of work and tired of watching Dick sort through schoolchildren’s drawings of Saturn. There’s a speaker series at the Field, if Dick wants to come, and he’s opening his mouth to ask when Dick hunches his shoulders, clearing his throat.

“Um, yeah, maybe.”

Nix frowns at him. “Well? Spill.”

Dick shakes his head, and Nix’s interest piques when he sees that Dick is actually blushing. “I’ve got a date,” he admits. “Maybe. We’re still working on the details.”

Nix tamps down on the hot flare of possessiveness, of hurt. Harry had been one thing, but Nix isn’t sure he can stomach another round of watching someone else cut in on Dick’s time. Nix tries to imagine where he would have gone on Christmas, and he’s already angry at whoever Dick would have been sitting next to by the fire instead.

He swallows hard. “Oh,” he says, and can’t come up with anything else. Dick breathes in through his nose.

“I can’t actually read your mind,” he says, an edge to his voice, and Nix blinks.

“Okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Dick says sharply, and Nix looks up in surprise. “You only liked Harry when you forgot we were dating, and you’re not okay now. I don’t know if it’s because you don’t like being reminded that I’m gay, or because I’m supposed to just be at your beck and call.”

Nix flinches, but Dick’s next words stop him cold.

“I love you, Nix.” He meets Nix’s gaze, his eyes blazing and angry. “I loved you when you were working on your marriage, and I loved you when you were getting over your marriage, and I even loved you when you started dating someone new, because we’re not a couple, and those are all your choices to make. You don’t get to not be there for me when I make my choices.”

“Because I wanted you to choose me!” Nix bursts out, then stops, marveling in a distant, terrified way at himself.

Dick stares at him. “I did,” Dick says, voice suddenly deadly quiet. “I asked you the first week I met you. I wanted you then.”

“And now? What if I choose you this time?”

Dick sits still for a long moment, and then he shakes his head. “You can’t just snap your fingers and expect me to rearrange my life for you.” He stands, leaving the room before Nix can think to stop him.

* * *

 

Nix is in his zone, music blasting, a beer by his mousepad, tracking down the most recent bug in the code and trying to figure out if it’s him or Webster who’s responsible for the latest “improvement.” Github is insistent that it’s Nix, but he’s pretty sure that’s only because Webster codes like a crazy person whose code never integrates properly. Case in point, Nix is buried inside some kind of goddamn thrice nested loop, and between his concentration and the music, it takes him a while to notice the doorbell.

Dick is standing on his porch when he opens the door, hands in his pockets and shivering a little in the chilly air, his breath steaming. “Hey.”

Nix blinks at him in surprise. “Hey.”

Dick raises his eyebrows, and Nix steps aside, gesturing him in. After the way they’d left things, he’s not sure he should say the first thing on his mind, but when Dick takes his time unwinding his scarf, Nix gives a mental shrug, dropping onto the couch and thinking, _Fuck it._ There’s no point talking around it. “Date a bust?”

Dick hangs up his jacket and scarf with careful deliberation, and Nix can see he’s dressed nicely, a green button down he tends to save for faculty meeting days. Nix, by contrast, had forgone shaving this morning, has on a faded band t-shirt, and is lucky to be wearing pants. But Dick has certainly seen him in worse condition. He happens to be sober, for instance, his half-finished beer back on the desk his only indulgence for the night.

Dick settles down not quite on the far end of the couch, a respectable, though small, distance separating them. “Actually, he was very nice. Paramedic, easy to talk to.”

The flare of jealousy is expected, comes as naturally as his next breath, but Nix doesn’t react to it, keeps his voice level. There’s a rising current of hope as well he’s just as cautious to acknowledge, that Dick is here at all. “Was he hot?” Nix asks the question like pressing on a bruise. He wants to know how much to hurt. The secret about Dick Winters, of course, is that he’s not half as nice as he appears, but he’s never cruel. So Nix isn’t sure why he’s here at all, telling Nix these things, but Nix’s natural pessimism is warring with his helpless and utter trust in Dick.

“He’s attractive,” Dick demurs, and finally raises his head, meeting Nix’s eyes with a rueful, apologetic look, and Nix draws in a breath.

“Yet here you are,” Nix points out.

“Here I am,” Dick agrees, looking at him steadily.

Nix considers, for half a moment. He could bitch Dick out. _Now_ who’s allowed to just change their mind and expect the other to come to heel? But where does that get them, when Dick is here, on his couch, his shoulders loose and open, his face an open question?

“Fuck you,” Nix advises him just on principle, a parting shot from his fleeting hurt pride, before he leans in, wrapping a hand around Dick’s neck and pulling him in for a kiss.

Dick’s mouth opens under his for one glorious moment before he pulls back, searching Nix’s face. “I’m not doing this if you’re angry,” he starts, and Nix kisses him again, interrupting him before he can get any further.

“I was angry thirty seconds ago,” he mutters in between short, pointed kisses across Dick’s jaw, ducking down to his throat. “You’re here now, I’m over it, I’m the furthest thing from angry, unless you wanna keep arguing?” He sucks a longer kiss under Dick’s ear, and Dick squirms, hands coming up to clutch at Nix’s sides, fisting in his t-shirt.

“Not the first thing on my mind,” he admits, and Nix is gratified to hear him a little breathless before he pulls Nix’s mouth back to his. Nix leverages himself forward, pressing Dick back against the arm of the couch, running his hands over as much of Dick as he can reach, yanking his shirt from where it was tucked neatly into his jeans and dragging his fingers up Dick’s ribs, tracing mindless patterns into the small of his back.

Dick repays him in kind, burying his fingers in Nix’s hair and pulling him close. He leaves Nix’s mouth to work his way down the side of Nix’s throat, and Nix presses his nose against Dick’s temple. “God, I’ve wanted you so long,” he murmurs, and Dick’s hands tighten on him in acknowledgment, though he seems intent on exploring Nix’s skin with lips and tongue instead of talking.

Nix, never one to mind a one-sided conversation as long as the side is his, picks up the slack.

“You drive me crazy,” he continues, almost groaning because Dick’s mouth is finally, finally on him and it’s like a dam breaking, all the things he’s wanted to say for months and couldn’t. “You look perfect all the time. Just sitting next to you in faculty meetings is torture. You’re incredibly hot when you’re annoyed. I want to kiss you every time you smile. I only went to the gym to watch you coming out of the pool.”

At this last, Dick finally raises his head, eyebrows quirking. “Seriously?”

Nix blinks down at him, confused and distracted. “What?”

“You only came to the gym with me to check me out?”

Nix rolls his eyes. “Jesus, Dick, it’s like you barely know me.”

And maybe because it was just a throwaway line, but when Dick cracks up, dropping his head back and laughing without reserve, Nix has maybe never loved him more. He crowds in closer, pulling him in for a renewed rush of kissing, and Dick hiccups through his laughter until he calms enough to kiss Nix back.

* * *

 

“So,” Nix says, while Dick’s fingers are moving though his hair afterward.

“Ann will be insufferable,” Dick replies, and Nix cranes his head.

“What?”

“She’s been rooting for us since the first time she met you,” he says, and Nix thinks back to that first moment in the stairwell. He knows he’d been obvious then, and wonders  if he’d even realized it.

“Your sister’s a lot smarter than us,” he observes, and when Dick’s fingers tighten just this side of painful in his hair he hurries to correct, “Mostly me. You had the right idea.”

“Mm.”

Nix is silent for a moment. “That wasn’t where I was going, though.”

Dick hums again, and Nix elbows him. “Wake up, this is a big idea too.” Dick opens his eyes, lids heavy, and Nix almost gets distracted before he raises himself up on one elbow. “I was thinking, before you came over. There’s a big get-together happening downtown later this month. Bunch of rich snobs with too much money, and all of them looking for ways to spend it.”

Dick’s face is still very close, the tiny crease between his eyebrows a wholly new shape from this perspective. “You sound like you’re planning a heist,” he says, and Nix laughs.

“Sure,” he agrees, reaching with his fingers to smooth out that crease. He sobers when he remembers time once again running through their hands. “More of a reverse heist,” he suggests. “If we can get some bigwig to fund the observatory, then no one else can steal you away.”

Dick worries at his lip. “What are the odds of that?” he asks.

Nix shrugs. “It’s not a regular grant proposal. I can’t tell you the oversubscription rate. But you’ve got me, and I know a thing or two about talking to rich assholes.” He means it to come out teasing, but as Nix lowers himself back down to kiss Dick’s lips, sees the shockingly earnest way Dick smiles up at him, he finds it’s not a joke at all. “You’ve got me,” he repeats, and hopes to hell it’s worth something.

* * *

 

They fall into a pattern in the weeks before the new semester starts. Nix has a whole new graduate class to pull together, this one the less enticing quantum mechanics class, though at least he has a standard textbook to lean on that’s barely changed since his own days at MIT. His undergraduate classes are a repeat of the fall, though with the mess that most of the term had been, those also need to be revised nearly in full.

He writes his outlines, drafts out homework sets, and then hands them to Dick to review. Dick insists on printing them out and physically scrawling over them in red pen in completely random order, as far as Nix can tell. Nix learns to turn on page numbering. In turn, Dick passes over his laptop with his most recent grant proposal, and Nix doubles down on all the bragging Dick is too modest to wield properly. The pile of untapped resources either of them can dig up is dwindling, and the proposals are becoming more unlikely. But they have it down to a science now, and Nix is as adept as Dick at swapping out paragraphs of background text for more figures, at slicing one proposal down to two pages, or pulling in extra material to balloon it up to six. He has folders with dozens of versions of at least four different basic proposals.

The sun sets early in Chicago in January, and they work until past dark, when Abbie starts to nudge Dick’s knee with her nose and dance invitingly toward the door. They bundle up against the wind and biting cold to walk her along the dark avenues near Dick’s house, the streetlights casting yellow pools on the snow, or along the brighter streets near Nix’s apartment. They stomp snow and salt from their shoes on the way back in and talk over dinner plans. Dick tends toward grilled cheese and canned soup, while Nix reaches for takeout menus.

One day they wake up in Dick’s basement room to the particularly bright quality of light than means fresh snow, reflecting brilliantly in the morning sun. Dick rouses himself to shovel the wide stretch of sidewalk in front of Florence and Ed’s house, while Nix burrows more deeply into the blankets. When Dick returns, he shucks his jeans and crawls back into bed, shoving icy feet against Nix’s legs, frozen hands against Nix’s ribs.

“Christ, I’m awake!” Nix yelps, and Dick adds a cold nose into the bargain, pressed into the warm skin of Nix’s throat. He doesn’t stay cold for very long, and they take an unofficial snow day, spending most of it under the covers.

They’re sitting on Nix’s couch one evening after more long hours of work, Dick frowning over email while Nix alternates between stack exchange and Reddit. Dick leans over, tilting his computer screen toward Nix. _We regret to inform you..._ the email starts, and Nix squeezes Dick’s hand, regarding him soberly.

“We’ve got other grants out there,” he points out, and Dick nods. Nix can tell he has something else to add, and he waits until Dick blows out a breath.

“They want me at Keck,” he admits. “Their outreach coordinator wants to open up a second position. She heard I was looking.”

Nix swallows. It’s one of the best telescopes in the world. It’s in Hawaii, all warm water and endless hiking and on the Big Island, safely away from all the tourists. Dick would love it. There’s nothing there for Nix, work-wise. “Well,” he starts, and can’t bring himself to say it. _You should go._ It may be petty, but he can’t. “Might get a tan finally,” he scrapes out, the best he can do.

Dick shrugs. “I told her I’d think about it.”

Nix nods, and wonders how selfish he’s really allowed to be. _Stay_ , he wants to say, though he knows it’s not fair, that Dick’s already trying as hard as he can. Instead, he puts his laptop on the coffee table, then takes Dick’s and closes it as well. Then he presses Dick back into the couch and kisses him. It starts slow, and Nix vaguely means it to be comforting, but it doesn’t stay that way. In the end, he’s pressing into Dick, staring down into his eyes in way he knows is eerily intense, fingers gripping too tightly into Dick’s skin as they rock against each other, wordless and gasping. He doesn’t say it in words, but he says it anyway, and he can’t bring himself to care.

* * *

 

The week before classes start, the gala Nix had his eye on rolls around. Dick offers a few half-hearted excuses: the odds are terrible; he’s not good in formal settings. Nix brushes these concerns aside and makes sure Dick’s suit is in good shape. He finds it both gratifying and concerning how easily Dick caves. He knows they’re both thinking about the long line of rejection emails.

Dick appears in the bedroom doorway from the bathroom, holding his arms out from his sides. “Presentable?”

Nix frowns at him and makes a motion toward his tie, then stops, keeping his hands to himself. “Maybe you _should_ look a little unkempt professor. It might invoke sympathy.”

Dick glares at him and yanks at the slightly crooked tie himself until it pulls loose, moving back to the mirror to make a second attempt.

“You look fine,” Nix corrects, moving up behind him to watch Dick’s fingers put the tie through its knot, a simple over-up-and-through. It looks just the same as it did the last time, but this time when Dick raises his eyebrows at Nix in the mirror, he simply nods back.

Dick watches the city as they drive uptown, the pale stretches of snow along Lake Shore Drive, the crowded bus stops farther up Michigan. Nix glances over. “You’re quiet.”

“And this is different from other nights how?” Dick asks, but Nix can hear the edge in his voice. 

“Just be yourself,” Nix advises, then thinks better of it. “Be your conference self. You’re manning a one-person booth tonight.”

Dick rolls his neck, looking as serious as he’s receiving military orders. “Got it.” The hotel appears down the block, golden and gleaming, and Nix pulls up in front. The valet trades him his keys for a ticket, and Dick is waiting on the sidewalk by the time Nix turns to him.

Nix walks them in the door of the hotel and back to the party. “Sure you don’t want something?” he asks while he steers them toward the bar. Dick ignores him.

“Club soda,” he instructs the bartender.

The room is already full of people clustered in small groups, the men in suits, the women in more varied states, from suits themselves up to long dresses. Nix scans the room and then jerks his head, setting off across the gleaming marble floor and feeling Dick fall in at his heels. Nix loosens his fingers on his glass and approaches a tall man with glasses.

“Daniel, it’s been a while,” he greets, and the man turns with a smile. Nix remembers Yale, sitting behind Daniel in two different business classes his first year, when friends were easy. He has a soft spot for Daniel as well, as one of the few who listened when Nix succumbed to the physics bug and waxed poetic about signals from the Big Bang and math. This was probably because Daniel had subjected Nix to his fair share of drunken rants about the beauty of economic models and the frustrating asymmetries and chaos of the real world.

“Nix!” Daniel greets with genuine warmth. “Is this where you disappeared to?”

“The great cornfields of Illinois,” Nix agrees without venom, and is almost surprised at how fond it comes out. He shakes it off before he gestures at Dick. “This is Dick Winters, he works with me at the university. Dick, Daniel Fertig.” The men shake hands, and Nix continues before Dick can utter more than _hello._ “Where have you been keeping yourself busy?”

They rattle off resumes for a few minutes while Dick stands, trying to look polite, but his hand is twitching slightly against his jacket pocket. Nix resists the urge to reach for him, to press his hand still.

About the time Dick has evolved from twitching to casting his eyes around the room, Nix breaks off his conversation. “Nice catching up with you. I’ve gotta introduce this guy to a few people.” And now he does grip Dick by the shoulder, nudging him away even as Dick holds out his hand again for a farewell shake.

“You didn’t even mention the observatory,” Dick mutters.

“Be patient.” Nix drops his hand. Dick stays close though, not needing the touch. “I haven’t seen Daniel in years, and he’s a soft touch. It was worth seeing what he’s up to, but not worth any more of our time.”

“Sounds like he’s done well for himself,” Dick observes, glancing over his shoulder. Daniel is already chatting with someone else.

“Not well enough for our purposes,” Nix says grimly. “We need a company. Unless Bill Gates himself is here, one guy’s not going to cut it.”

But the night wears on, and Nix collects business cards and chats up old friends, and finally, after so long Dick looks startled at the change in procedure, he cues Dick to tell a woman named Natalie Serling about the work he does.

She listens intently, interrupting him a few times to ask questions, and finally cuts him off entirely and hands Dick her business card. “Email me,” she says seriously, and turns into the crowd.

Dick looks at Nix, nonplussed, but Nix smiles at him. “She’s like that,” he says.

They email Serling when they get home, Nix leaning over Dick’s shoulder to dictate until he simply hands his laptop over. She replies with the briefest proposal solicitation form either of them have seen yet. The starkness of it just makes it more intimidating. At this point, they could both write Dick’s grant proposal in their sleep, and afterward, Nix can’t even remember which of them attached the document and hit send. They send it out within a day, and sit back to wait.

* * *

 

Classes begin, and Nix’s students return from winter break and the bottom of the world. Malarkey definitely broke and thinks he later fixed the way the data feeds combine from the different instruments, which seems to have both thrilled and terrified him. Webster spends most of his meeting with Nix waxing poetic about the endless light and snow he saw. But Nix has been watching his code check-ins over the past few weeks, and he’s satisfied that at least some progress was made.

Dick isn’t in their office when Nix checks in after class. He sends a query text and lingers over his email before he finally heads home. His apartment seems strangely empty after the last month of near constant company. It’s after seven when Dick eases the door open and lets Abbie in to greet Nix and then hop up to take a proprietary sprawl on the sofa.

Dick sits down next to her without removing his coat. “I got two more letters today,” he says, grim-faced, and he doesn’t need to say the word _rejection_. Nix looks at his hands and nose, red from the cold, and realizes he’s been out walking, stewing over it most of the evening. Dick refuses a consolation drink when Nix offers him one, but he looks for once like he might be thinking about it. Nix makes pasta while Dick haunts his living room, stony and silent. The rest of the night is oddly quiet, Dick absorbed in thought, Nix wary of breaking the mood into something worse. They climb into bed with almost no words exchanged.

“I said no,” Dick says into the dark.

Nix turns his head, questioning, but glad to hear Dick speaking again.

“To Hawaii.”

Nix feels his stomach drop out. “Dick.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Nix thinks about Dick giving up the work he loves, puttering around Chicago while Nix continues stumbling through his own research, his teaching efforts that might still fall flat. It isn’t fair that Dick be the one to settle.

Nix lets out a long breath. “I could make a job for you in Nixon,” he offers again. He locks eyes on Dick this time, forcing himself to see whether the position tempts him or offends him, attracts or repulses. Dick doesn’t bat an eye.

“No, Lew,” he says softly. “We’re not doing that.”

“I know it wouldn’t be great,” Nix has to explain. “But it’d be something, and it’d be a permanent position, something you wouldn’t have to beg for every two years. There’s at-risk kids in Nixon, too, Dick, and you can do after-school science with them.”

“And you’ll do what?” Dick asks, voice stiff with disbelief. “Shuffle papers for the rest of your life?”

“Half of any job is paper shuffling,” Nix says, and with all the grant research and writing he’s done this year, all the paperwork for his classes, it almost feels true. He couldn’t have done it for Kathy. But for Dick…

Dick’s hand finds his face in the dark, and with the blinds closed against the streetlights, Nix can still barely see him, but he knows he’s close. “If I thought you’d be happy there, I would,” Dick says. “We’ll find another way.” Dick kisses him.

* * *

 

Whatever Dick had decided that evening out in the cold, it sticks with him. After that night, it’s Nix who does all the worrying, while Dick maintains a subdued but relentless optimism.

Nix’s classes aren’t perfect, but he’s spared the disaster of the fall. Sink takes to nodding at him in the halls again, instead of the narrow-eyed glares he’d adopted sometime in early winter.

He takes to sitting with Webster on long Thursday afternoons, trying to guide his meandering investigations into something they can turn into a paper. Nix sometimes goes home and measures out fingers of whiskey after those meetings, fighting the urge to throw it all away. At least last time he’d mostly taken himself down. He’s not sure he can face pushing his own student into a bad publication, should his judgment fail him a second time.

Ron digs this out of him over pool once night, while Carwood and Dick pick over bar food in a booth, deep in their own conversation.

“It’s all wrong eventually,” Ron says, and shoots. He misses but leaves Nix without any obvious angle, and he stands, satisfied. “That’s how it works. Science is one long cycle of us proving each other wrong. You’re not special. Shake it off and move on.”

Nix drinks his beer instead of responding and then sets it down to line up his shot. There’s the familiar sharp crack as the cue and ball collide. Against all odds, Nix’s four ball slides perfectly sideways into the pocket.

* * *

 

“You ready?”

Nix grimaces, looking over. “Why are we doing this at 10am?” he asks, not for the first time, and Dick just grins.

“Morning moving builds character,” he says cheerfully, and Nix wants to have some snappy comeback but Christ, it’s barely 10am, so he just reaches out for Dick’s coffee instead, oversweet and half milk as it is. Dick fends him off, hand snapping down to protect his cup with a betrayed expression. Nix slinks off meekly to refill his own cup from the gallon cardboard jug they’d bought. It’s early, but the May sun is bright, streaming in through Nix’s windows and the boxes piled high and haphazard around his rooms.

Florence and Ed had given up on the house. The stairs, Florence claimed, were no good for her hip. So their daughters had driven down from Kenosha and moved them into a one-story rambler closer to them.

“You know you can come here,” Nix said when Dick told him, back in March, while he chopped potatoes and Dick sculpted hamburgers at the kitchen counter. Through the window of Nix’s high-rise, Chicago’s lights glittered in the dark. “I know it doesn’t have the yard, but you and Abbie are both here plenty anyway. It’ll work until we figure out what comes next.”

“They offered me the house,” Dick had told him, and Nix looks up, thrown. “They’re willing to backdate it as a rent-to-own, which means I could afford it. Easily, in fact, if you—“ he took a careful breath, focusing on the patties slowly taking shape in his hands. “If that’s something you’d be interested in.”

“Dick.” Nix had set down his paring knife. “We still don’t know what’s going to happen. You might not be here in six months. Hell, _I_ might not be here in a year, depending on my tenure review.”

Dick’s hands were covered in grease, but he leaned in anyway, pressing just his mouth to Nix’s lips. Nix kissed him back. It was a conscious decision he’d made. He didn’t know how long any of this would last, any of the dinners and long nights on the couch or nights out with friends or lazy Saturdays in bed. So he tried not to pass up a single opportunity to kiss Dick.

Dick pulled back. “You’re doing great, Lew. Your classes are fine, Webster’s project is coming along. You’re going to be right here as long as you want. And I want to be here with you. We’ll get a grant. Or I’ll wait until the planetarium wants to hire me. I can teach—adjunct, community college, high school. I’ll find something. But this is what I want, and I want you with me.”

And Nix couldn’t muster a single argument against that.

They hash out the paperwork and details as spring waxes and begins to wane into summer. Nix had rented most of his apartment furniture, and the company will pick it up once he’s gone. The boxes he has are mostly books and clothes, and once Carwood and Ron show up, it’s quick work to form a chain transporting them through the service elevator of Nix’s building and into the rented van.

Harry shows up with a bright-eyed, curly-haired woman who can only be Kitty and makes introductions. Nix watches Dick, not sure if he’s jealous or simply looking to break up any tension that arises, but Dick seems genuinely happy to see them. Harry positively beams as he introduces Kitty around, and then he’s helping Nix carry a nightstand up a flight of stairs and they’re chatting like no time has passed. Kitty is the only one of them smart enough to have kept a screwdriver on her, instead of leaving it buried in a mess of other boxes, and she darts merrily around the house, disassembling and reassembling furniture as needed to maneuver it into place.  

They’re done by midafternoon. Nix orders pizza, and they sit around the backyard and shake out their tired arms while Abbie wanders from person to person, propping her head on borrowed knees and pretending she’s not begging for pizza crusts. Eventually, the others make their way home, and Dick starts clearing paper plates. Nix finds that his phone’s battery is dead, and grabs Dick’s off the charger on the windowsill. He still needs to drop the moving truck off, and he doesn’t remember what time the U-haul place closes. Dick has one new message, and Nix swipes into it without thinking.

He finds Dick in the kitchen, putting out real food for Abbie and crushing empty pizza boxes. He holds out Dick’s phone. “I was checking what time U-Haul closes. You should look at your email.” Dick looks up quickly at Nix’s tone, wiping his hands and reaching for the phone. He frowns.

“Nix, you opened my message?”

Nix makes a hurrying motion with his hands. “Dick, I read your mail all the time. Don’t act surprised now.”

Dick frowns, and Nix knows he’s seeing the Serling Foundation sender, the header, SOLICITED PROPOSAL DECIS...

Dick sets his mouth and taps the message, and Nix watches his face. Almost predictably, Dick’s expression barely changes. He isn’t a jumping-for-joy kind of guy. But Nix watches his mouth ease from set and wary to a pleased curve, just the corner of his mouth turning up, his eyes suddenly relaxed and happy. He looks up. “We’re good.”

“How long?” Nix asks. In response to the amused quick of Dick’s eyebrow, he shrugs. “I only read the first line. I figured, ‘Congratulations,’ pretty much covered the important parts.”

“Five years,” Dick says, wonderingly.

Nix wraps an arm around his shoulder, kissing his forehead, then his lips. “So we’ll take a few years off from grant-writing. Then do this all again.”

“Can’t wait.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story is very near and dear to my heart. Most places named here are quite real, and many of the plot details are based, though tweaked, on real life history and events. I have stolen Nix’s retraction problems in a very loose fashion from the (imho) embarrassing, educational, and fascinating story of how some people did a bit too much early celebrating when they published a paper claiming they’d spotted some direct evidence of the Big Bang. You can read about that in [this Economist story.](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21620049-dramatic-recent-discovery-physics-looking-rather-dodgy-dust-dust)


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